Proposal to revitalize release branches: Make them cheap, and make them work.

[Adam Conrad]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2014 at 08:16:46AM +0100, Will Newton wrote:
> On 2 October 2014 21:54, Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > * Post all release branch commits to new libc-stable mailing list.
> >         - If you commit to a stable branch, you post that commit to the
> >           new libc-stable mailing list.
> 
> This sounds like something that could be automated.

+1 for automating this with a commit hook.  When I suggested the stable
mailing list, the idea was to make sure that the burden on the commiter
remained low (ie: you commit to 2.19, but don't care about 2.17, the
list takes care of notifying Carlos, who cares about 2.17, and it's not
your problem).  The obvious downside of this was that is introduced a
need for the committer in question to send an email, thus impacting the
"keep it lightweight" goal of Carlos'.  Automation seems the best of
both worlds here.

With that change, the process for a stable branch cherrypick or backport
is literally "commit locally, push, forget about it", which sounds like
exactly how simple we need to make this to make those branches widely
used.

... Adam