Re: Versioning/release policy proposal

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 6 Oct 2006, at 19:16, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> I like this proposal very much, there is one area, where I see  
> problems,
> but we could wait until we actually face them. This is the  
> question, who
> will be willing to work on the bugfix releases?
> Most developers will spend their time and efforts on the new unstable
> release, then somebody needs to decide that some change to the  
> unstable
> release is worthwhile to be ported back to the last stable release,
> integrate it there and make a release. The procedure itself sounds  
> fine,
> but as long as nobody volunteers to actually follow it, it wont help.
> Any volunteers?

Helge claims that people *will* backport  fixes from unstable to  
stable releases.

I'm not convinced, but I don't see any reason why we shouldn't try  
it ... the worst that can happen is that nobody ever backports any  
bugfixes, in which case we are really in much the same position that  
we are in now ... the only additional overhead we have incurred is  
making two releases at once.

The ideal situation is to persuade people who don't normally  
contribute to do the bugfix backporting ... because they are just  
backporting code that people have already contributed, there is  
probably no copyright assignment issue, so we could accept *anyone*  
doing that for us, without having to go through any administrative  
formalities.  That lowers the entry barrier for volunteer and we  
would just need to review their patches and commit them.