Community Patch Review Meeting: 2021-01-11 at 0900h EST (UTC-5)

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 12:05 AM Adhemerval Zanella
<adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org> wrote:
>      Florian said he will check on this, but he wasn't sure it he will
>      finish in time.  Both patches seems ok at first glance for me,
>      although Siddhesh has raised some concerns about the 2nd patch
>      loader change (and H.J.Lu noted that we did change the loader for
>      the hwcap isa work recently).

Oh I did not have any specific concerns about the second patch because
I had not even seen it :)

What I said was that typically during freeze we limit non-bug-fix
changes to those that don't have a major impact on architecture and
distribution testing and that criteria may need to be applied to the
second patch.  It's your call to make as RM on whether to include it
or not, not mine.

>   2. ld.so: DSO sorting algorithm patch, both testing infrastructure and
>      new algorithm [3][4]: Florian is not sure if this change would be fully
>      reviewed for 2.33, so he is considering postponing to 2.34.

It was this patch that I specifically stated was IMO unsuitable for
inclusion during freeze since it would interfere with distro and
architecture testing schedules, but again it's your call as RM.  The
more important point I made was to encourage review of the patch so
that it is ready for inclusion the moment master opens again and
doesn't get forgotten.

In fact, I want to start a conversation on whether we should
reconsider this aspect of the release freeze process.  The freeze
process made sense 7-8 years ago when we were a smaller contributor
group and all of us would be focused on bug fixes and testing during
that time and there was little scope of us being able to review new
patches during that time.  We are a significantly larger group now, so
does it make sense to change the process to make the release branch at
the freeze point and continue development on master?  That way we
potentially allow development to continue on the master branch while
the release branch stabilizes.  Tentatively, the freeze point would
look like this:

1. RM calls freeze and asks everyone to stop commits to the repo
2. Make a release/2.x/master
3. Update VERSION to 2.x+1.9000 in master
4. Announce release branch on libc-alpha and reopen development

>From this point on, development continues as normal on master.  For
inclusion in release/2.x/master, RM approval is necessary.

Siddhesh