Hello Ciaran! (On a totally unrelated side-note - how do you pronounce your name?)
Let's take a real world example: KDE 3.5.5 is old, buggy and has some important issues which won't be fixed anymore.Yet it's the most proven version on mips.
Yes.
...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when they try to do anything.
Yes, all three solutions would have disadvantages for some, indeed.
The solution I favour by far is c). What's your suggestion [...]
Unfortunately, you didn't explicitly answer this so I gather you're in favour of just keeping 3.5.5 around?
3.5.5 was good enough to be keyworded stable at one point. Thus, it can't be *that* bad.
Yes, because at that time, many of those issues, some of which are security ones, simply weren't known at that point. Security issues tend not to be known from the start (or they wouldn't exist at all :-) ) but can turn up at any later time. This is the case for KDE 3.5.5.
--Best regards, Wulf "grateful for an answer, remembering you declared to completely ignore morons ;-)" Krüger
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