Release 0.26: branching

[Mike Frysinger]

On 13 Nov 2015 10:54, Matthias Klose wrote:
> On 09.11.2015 17:27, Tristan Gingold wrote:
> > there was a lot of work on binutils recently (nice!).
> > Previously, I tried to find a period of calm to create
> > a release branch, but I wasn’t able to this year.
> >
> > So, how to process ?  Is it reasonable to ask developers to
> > be quiet ?  From my experience, it doesn’t work very well
> > because we all want to push our new features in the next
> > release, so instead of being quiet developers hurry up.
> >
> > I could also create a branch from a past point, but all
> > the bug fixes won’t be in the new release, so there would
> > be additional backport work.
> >
> > So, this is just a call for avoiding submitting new
> > features, just to aim at a new release.
> 
> thanks for bringing this up, and for seeking for a path to a release.  Not sure 
> how to address this, however would it be possible to have more time based 
> releases?  Binutils somehow had a yearly release schedule, releasing in "summer" 
> for the more recent releases, switching to "late summer" for the past releases. 
>   We are in late autumn now.  Doing the binutils branch only after GCC enters 
> stage3 makes sense too.  Having an end of year release sounds fine, but if this 
> then again slips past the GCC releases typically done in March/April every year, 
> people probably start relying more on trunk builds again?

i wouldn't mind every 6 months myself.  then release slippage isn't as big a
deal.  i think the fact that there is only one release a yes is what pushes
people to try and get their feature in, even if the quality is subpar.  if
they don't, then it'll be over a year before users see the results.

> Three weeks ago I switched the current Ubuntu development release to use 
> binutils trunk, finding four or five regressions up to now without doing a full 
> test rebuild.  I'm planning to do that for Debian as well now that the 2.26 
> branch is there.  Do other distros have experience using the recent trunk?

Gentoo used to for a few years but we gave up as it was too unstable.
we've been fairly happy with the releases.
-mike
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