patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp)

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Feb-2009, WMennerich wrote:

| Both branches come from 3.0.
| Hence, the patches included in 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3 and 3.0.4
| could also be necessary for 3.1.5x as long as they touch only
| parts of the sources which are not different between 3.0 and 3.1.5x .
| Or are the two branches already to different?

The general idea is that bugs are fixed in the main development branch
3.1, and then patches that are appropriate for the stable branch are
applied there.

In the 3.0.x branch, we applied a lot of patches, attempting to fix
many of the bugs reported, possibly at the expense of stability.

In the future, I would like to see us only applying patches to the
stable branch that fix regressions from previously released versions
of Octave.  Otherwise, I think applying too many patches does not
tend to improve the stability of the series of "stable" releases, and 
takes up effort that could be better used on the main development
branch.

So, I would like to see our guidelines for the next stable release
series be

  * If the bug was present in past versions of Octave (so not a
    regression), fix it in the development branch only.

  * If a bug appears in the stable version that was not present in
    previous versions (a regression), then the problem should be fixed
    in both the development and stable branches.

No other patches should be applied to the stable branch without some
discussion, and I would argue against applying the patch in nearly all
cases.  I would probably only argue in favor of applying a patch for a
bug that is not a regression if it is causes a serious problem, like
making Octave crash.  But it seems likely that problems like that
would also be regressions.

Comments?

jwe