RFC: Should we have a 2.30.1 point release ?

[Carlos O'Donell]

On 04/20/2018 05:24 AM, Nick Clifton wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
>>   Do you think that we should have a 2.30.1 point release ?
> 
> Well there has been a resounding "meh" to this idea, so I am going
> to keep things simple and shelve the idea.  If a critical patch
> does some along then we can make a point release at that time.

$0.02.

In glibc when we release X.Y, we immediately mark the release/X.Y/master
branch as being called X.Y.1, and we label it as a "rolling release"
in which most distributions sync to it directly, and it accepts only
patches from master that fix bugs. In this way we never make new point
releases from release/X.Y/master, we just coordinate with the distributions
to sync this into their stable releases. Fedora tracks them directly, and
so does Debian and others.

It works well for our distro users, who tend to consume the stable branch
directly and sync as new fixes arrive in a rolling CI fashion.

It works well for our direct end-users, who tend to consume only the official
twice-annually releases, since they don't want to track a stable branch,
but prefer an officially supported tarball.

Given the release is time-boxed and twice a year, it seems to be sufficiently
aligned with the needs of all of our users.

The reason I asked my original questions was to make us all think deeply about:

* Are our users consume point releases?
* How do our direct end-users consume binutils?
* How do our distro users consume binutils?

Ask yourself these questions as the Fedora binutils maintainer :-)

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.