Generally: if someone thinks correctness fix X should be backported further, I'd say just do it, if it's to an active release branch (see below). Anything that important has to outweigh most any other concern, like behavior changes.
On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 11:08 AM Tom Graves <tgraves...@yahoo.com> wrote: > I'm not really sure what you mean by this, this proposal is to introduce a > process for this type of issue so its at least brought to peoples > attention. We can't do anything to make people work on certain things. If > they aren't raised as important issues then its really easy to miss these > things. If its a blocker we should also not be doing any new releases > without a fix for it which may motivate people to look at it. > I mean, what are concrete steps beyond saying this is a problem? That's the important thing to discuss. There's a good one here: let's say anything that's likely to be a correctness or data loss issue should automatically be labeled 'correctness' as such and set to Blocker. That can go into the how-to-contribute manual in the docs and in a note to dev@. > I agree it would be good for us to make it more official about which > branches are being maintained. I think at this point its still 2.1.x, > 2.2.x, and 2.3.x since we recently did releases of all of these. Since 2.4 > will be coming out we should definitely think about stop maintaining > 2.1.x. Perhaps we need a table on our release page about this. But this > should be a separate thread. > > I propose writing something like this in the 'versioning' doc page, to at least establish a policy: Minor release branches will, generally, be maintained with bug fixes releases for a period of 18 months. For example, branch 2.1.x is no longer considered maintained as of July 2018, 18 months after the release of 2.1.0 in December 2106. This gives us -- and more importantly users -- some understanding of what to expect for backporting and fixes. I am going to revive the thread about adding PMC / committers as it's overdue. That may not do much, but, more hands to do more work ought to possibly free up people to focus on deeper harder issues.
