Re: [Libevent-users] Plan for backporting bugfixes to stable releases

[Nick Mathewson <nickm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Kevin Bowling
<kevin.bowling@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Nick Mathewson <nickm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, all!  Here's a thing I wrote up to try to explain a proposed
>> policy for what to backport to 2.0.x once it's stable, and what to
>> backport to 1.4.x after 2.0.x is released.  Absent major problems with
>> it, the current Libevent core developers are probably going to stick
>> with this for official releases, though of course nothing is written
>> in stone.
>>
>> In other news, we have had almost no bugs found in 2.0.9-rc so far.
>> Absent big issues getting discovered, we'll probably be releasing
>> 2.0.10-stable some time in the next week or two.
>
> The one scary thing is that good changes will get stuck in a year or
> multi-year development process.  A good tempo for a project like this would
> be 6 month intervals so we have a chance of regularly hitting distros like
> Fedora  and Ubuntu and enough useful changes have probably accumulated in
> that interval.  Consider 2.0, which is a huge improvement over 1.4, but has
> yet to be found on disros I know of.
>
> With the 6 month release cycle, doing at minimum 1 or 2 year stable periods
> would quickly become overwhelming.  Another page from the Linux playbook:
> nominate "Long Term Support" releases for "enterprise" customers that want
> to bundle, and end mainstream support for the intermediate releases after
> the the next 2 are stable.

A good thought.  The 2.0 release cycle was way way too slow at ~2.5
years.  If we wind up getting our act together enough to get releases
out on a one-per-year basis, then we'll have two or three stable
releases at any time, which isn't so bad... but if we get much faster
than one-per-year, we'll want to revise this policy.

With any luck, if that should happen, we can take another page from
the Linux playbook and have enough active enthusiastic developers that
somebody besides me can be in charge of the "Long term support"
series, and maybe the "stable" series too. ;)

peace,
-- 
Nick
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