Stable releases of Bazaar?

[Martin Pool]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 5:41 PM, David Ingamells
<david.ingamells at mapscape.eu> wrote:
> Jonathan Lange wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 1:16 PM, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> For people to be happily using stacking with launchpad we need them to
>>> install 1.6.
>>>
>>
>> Or perhaps 1.7. The 1.6 release changes a lot of things and is
>> therefore likely to have more than its share of bugs.
>>
>>
>
> Has the Bazaar team considered identifying certain releases as stable
> releases which will enjoy ongoing support with bug fixes being applied?
>
> Bazaar is now mature enough with a large enough user base for this to be
> beneficial. I agree with Jonathan's  remark above (without any criticism of
> the Bazaar team intended): I am reluctant to move to 1.6 because of the
> number of major changes that will appear in this release, however I am
> suffering from some problems with 1.5 (with bzr+ssh://) that are likely
> solved in 1.6. I therefore have a quandary.
>
> I am very aware of the burden added by stable release support as that is one
> of my roles within my team (I often have to integrate the same fix into 3
> different releases); the benefit is a stable environment for the users with
> the ability to control when new features are rolled out.

Hi David,

It's an interesting point; thanks for raising it.

There would definitely be a benefit for some users in having a stable
branch which gets only serious bug fixes and no new features.  It is
always going to be a bit of a compromise as to whether a particular
change's risk:reward tradeoff is worth putting into there, not to
mention the tradeoff of putting time into the backport vs new work.

Perhaps you'd be interested in helping maintain a backported stable
branch - at least in testing it and perhaps nominating/merging things
to go in?

There is another thread about doing a 1.3.2 to go into hardy-updates
and perhaps that would be good for the generally available stable
branch too.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>