> 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
