On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 07:34:51PM +0200, Eric Botcazou wrote:
> > Even with official release you can apply a patch, that is not the point.
> > The point is that many people expect the release branches (and IMHO rightly
> > so) to be supposedly stable all the time, rather than being seriously
> > unstable most of the time and only converging to stability around the
> > official releases.
>
> Possibly, but with our scheme it's the opposite: it's stable most of the time
> and series of patches are applied just before the releases...
That's not completely true. Some people do (at least for the non-risky
changes) backports immediately, others often do it in batches, days to weeks
to months after trunk commits, but most of the batches aren't close to releases.
If you look e.g. at 4.8 branch, there were less than 50 (non-DATESTAMP)
commits in the last month, but more than 300 (non-DATESTAMP) commits this year
(and quite a few in between 4.8.2 release and New Year). So I'd say the
last month on 4.8 branch was pretty much a normal month on the branch,
nothing exceptional.
Jakub
