Suggestion: Changes to release process, release from branch

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On 2026-07-27 11:34, DJ Delorie wrote:
> "Andreas K. Huettel" <dilfridge@gentoo.org> writes:
>> * With the hard freeze two weeks before nominal/last possible release
>> date, the release branch is made, and the master branch is re-opened
>> for development.
> 
> I don't feel strongly about this, but let me add some reasons to not do
> this:
> 
> * Easier to make changes in the release that aren't reflected back to
>    master (and visa-versa)
> 
> * Developers and contributors focus on master and the release branch
>    gets ignored
> 
> * Testing on the branch doesn't help master as much
> 
> * Important patches may not get copied to the branch in time
> 
> * Developers don't get a break from developing ;-)  (not that they want
>    it, because we're all overachievers, but it's still a good thing ;)
> 
> * If a patch is needed on the release branch, it still has to go through
>    the get-approved-on-master process first, and if master has diverged
>    from the release, this becomes more difficult.
> 
> It's been my experience, here and on other projects, that release
> branches are where code goes to die.  The users use it, but the
> developers are elsewhere, because elsewhere is more fun.  IMHO the
> longer we can keep the developers focused on a release, the better.
> 
> I suppose we should dig up the archives from the discussion about moving
> to the current model, and see what problems were were trying to solve
> back then.
It's just a 2 week divergence though, are any of these issues going to 
be serious enough to be problematic?  There is one caveat when comparing 
with gcc, binutils, etc. though, in that the release branches get 
actively maintained, which isn't necessarily the case for glibc.  I mean 
we do attempt to backport CVE fixes for the most part (and some serious 
bug fixes) but it's not nearly as consistent as gcc and we definitely 
don't do update releases from the release branches.

FWIW, I think I had brought this up nearly a decade ago and we ended up 
not doing this; I don't remember if the conversation was at a Cauldron 
BoF or on the mailing list, maybe Jeff or Carlos may remember.  The 
branch-and-continue-keeping-master-open approach keeps a decent momentum 
going IMO.

Sid