> Lots of people seem to test release branches -- probably more than mainline
> -- and I would hope that using the fix from this PR is by far the strongest 
> contender.

Definitely.  People report bugs against released versions and expect fixes for 
these versions, not for versions that will be released one year from now.

> I think we'd be doing ourselves a favour by going with what we 
> expect to be the final fix and getting as much testing of it as possible.
> After all, it's not difficult to test & apply a patch to a branch at the
> same time as mainline, or to revert it in the same way.

Exactly my position. :-)

> Also, having patches on mainline and not a release branch can cause
> quite a bit of confusion.  Witness what happend with PR 28243, where I
> fixed something on mainline, but it was not directly approved for a
> release branch.  Then Eric B. worked around the same problem on the
> release branch and forward-ported the work-around to mainline, where
> it wasn't really needed.

I'd have said: "fixed a subcase" but the picture is globally correct.
Btw, what about backporting your fix?  Or is it too late now?

> I just don't think it's as obvious a call as your question above makes out.
> There are downsides to this approach too, especially when no one person
> is in overall charge of repository (mainline and branch).

Right.  And, in my opinion, these downsides are easily underestimated.

-- 
Eric Botcazou

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