> The point of it is that the release branches are actually used by GCC users, > many people don't use just official releases, but arbitrary snapshots from > the release branches. If a potentially risky patch is applied immediately > also to release branches and soon needs follow-ups (happened many times in > the recent history), then that results in unnecessary breakage.
IMO that's a rather weak point, if people use arbitrary snapshots then they can revert to the previous one; similarly, if they use the SVN tree, then they can back out the patch manually. You cannot do that for an official release. -- Eric Botcazou
