Re: Release planning (was: Re: Status report)

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Lamar Owen wrote:

> But Tom's assertion is true. We have enough trouble getting patches
> rolled out; adding parallel branches is just begging for trouble, due to
> our relatively small resource size. Although, we probably have enough
> developers at this point to make it happen.

Except, we already have parallel branches, else we'd never have made a
7.4.x release ...

> Bruce I would want to be the patchmeister for the stable branch.
> Someone else (with Bruce's oversight, or Tom's, or whoever) could do the
> patchmunging and review for the development tree. But I want a stable
> hand on patches that go into the stable tree.
>
> The BSD's release something like that, with CURRENT, TESTING, and STABLE,
> right? (I'm not a big BSD user...)

We have a CURRENT branch where all the 'innovations' are done (SMP
re-writes, etc) ... and a STABLE which is a release with stuff patched
down from CURRENT *if* applicable ... periodically, a RELEASE is made
along either branch, and, some day, what is currently CURRENT will be
re-tag'd as -STABLE, and then CURRENT will become a new branch ...

So, for instance, the way we number:

7.4.x would be -STABLE
HEAD would be -CURRENT

once 7.5 is released, it would surplant 7.4 as -STABLE, previous versions
would only ever see 'security related patches' and work towards 7.6
would be -CURRENT ...

Now, if we went with a 'long term dev cycle', then we might look at 7.x as
being -STABLE, while work towards 8.x would be considered -CURRENT ...

As a community, I don't think we should be 'supporting' anything older
then the last STABLE ...

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