branch backport policy wrt changes in INSTALL requirements

[Mike Frysinger <vapier at gentoo dot org>]

On 04 Oct 2016 17:48, Florian Weimer wrote:
> On 10/04/2016 05:34 PM, H.J. Lu wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 8:24 AM, Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
> >> On 10/04/2016 04:47 PM, H.J. Lu wrote:
> >>> On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 3:52 AM, Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
> >>>> On 09/27/2016 07:35 PM, H.J. Lu wrote:
> >>>>> I'd like to backport it to 2.23 and 2.24 branches.  Any objections?
> >>>>
> >>>> Just this change, or the requirement for an AVX512F-capable assembler as
> >>>> well?
> >>>
> >>> Good question.  This is also needed:
> >>>
> >>> commit f43cb35c9b3c35addc6dc0f1427caf51786ca1d2
> >>> Author: H.J. Lu <hjl.tools@gmail.com>
> >>> Date:   Fri Jul 1 05:54:43 2016 -0700
> >>>
> >>>     Require binutils 2.24 to build x86-64 glibc [BZ #20139]
> >>
> >> That's not really backportable, I'm afraid.  Our users don't expect we break
> >> builds in this way.
> >
> > Who are those users?
> 
> We don't know, really.  But moving forward the baseline binutils 
> requirement in a stable release really contradicts what a stable release 
> is about.

old post, but i agree here.  our wiki doesn't cover this explicitly that
i can see, but it does:
  Usually, the interested committers have discretion over which bugfixes to
  pick for back-porting, but if discussion arises, general consensus of the
  community is sought, the default choice being to err on the conservative
  side.  Patch backports to stable branches are discussed on libc-stable,
  and any patch on master that doesn't change ABI or API is immediately
  suitable for backporting to a stable branch.

i think we should add "cannot change INSTALL requirements" to the list of
things that are inappropriate.
-mike

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature