Re: Rolling master branch

[Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh at redhat dot com>]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 10:28:43AM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> In glibc the community has been dysfunctional for so long that the
> carrot is gone, and downstream accepted a long time ago that they would
> have to carry lots and lots of custom glibc patches. It became the new
> normal to have a heavily patched glibc. So if we block master from
> reopening until all P1 bugs are fixed, people will, IMO, just patch
> locally and ignore upstream.

This really needs to change.  I'd like to think that we're a very
receptive community now and downstream hasn't had this excuse now for
a couple of years at least.  I guess we are seeing some changes with
people from other projects slowly starting to contact us instead of
just hacking in workarounds, so hopefully in another year or so this
won't be a problem.

> Thus I think the other way around, frequent, fast, on-time, releases
> makes downstream trust us more. On top of that we need to send all of
> our fixes upstream first and keep the value in staying in sync with
> upstream. If we do this for long enough the carrot grows back, and then
> we might change the model.
> 
> The present problem is that we're trying to do too much per release
> and we should instead make the blocker definition very strick and very
> narrow, and keep releasing frequently and on time.

Fair enough, I wasn't hoping for things to change right away anyway.
It was just something I thought of and figured it might be useful to
get other people's opinions.

> Notice this is less technical and more psychological than we usually
> talk on libc-alpha :-)

I found it useful so I hope some others did too.  Now let's talk about
getting rid of ChangeLogs ;)

Siddhesh

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