Upcoming release schedule - 8.4 ?

[Konstantin Belousov]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 08:20:02AM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Thursday, June 14, 2012 12:30:19 am Adrian Chadd wrote:
> > On 13 June 2012 21:26, Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 08:50:24AM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> > >> The only way that this would really work is if there were dedicated
> > >> sustaining engineers working on actively backporting code, testing it,
> > >> committing it, etc.
> > >
> > > I'm going to agree with Garrett here.  IMHO we've reached (or surpassed)
> > > the limit of what is reasonable to ask volunteers to commit their spare
> > > time to.  This is doubly true when we have more than one "stable" branch.
> > 
> > I totally concur.
> 
> This is why I think we need fewer branches so that there is less merging to 
> do.  Even in the bad old 4.x days developers would merge things (especially
> driver updates) from HEAD back to 4.x.  If we move X.0 releases farther
> apart then developers will still MFC things, the issue is that they don't
> want to MFC to 2 stable branches.

I do not find it cumbersome to merge to two branches. What I find quite
demotivating is the conflicts and drifted KPI/API. So my usual reaction
to the attempt to merge to stable/8 which fails due to conflicts is just
remove the MFC reminder.

I do sometimes reconsider the choice if explicitely asked by somebody,
but I really prefer to not do risky commits to old and presumably stable
branches. I do not have much incentive to merge to 8 anyway, except a
warm feeling of providing some relief to a peer.

So having long-living stable/8 and not having stable/9 means not doing
some merges at all, instead of doing just one merge. YMMV.
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