Follow Up from "Let's Discuss Interim Releases"

[Scott Kitterman]

Chow Loong Jin <hyperair at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>On 10/03/2013 09:35, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> [...]
>> There's still the requirement to keep things in sync.  That's what I
>was
>> referring to.  Also, for many common targets for SRUs/late bug fixes
>that are 
>> actively maintained, the packages in the development release would
>quickly 
>> diverge and so you'd still have to do two sets of patches.  Except
>for reduced 
>> QA requirements, it doesn't seem to offer much over release and SRU
>and I'm not 
>> sure reduced QA is actually a feature.
>
>I don't really see an issue with having to maintain two sets of
>patches, really.
>If we're going to have a rolling release as well as make stable
>releases,
>maintaining two sets of patches for the SRUable changes is a minimum,
>and
>something we should stick to.

First, I find the term rolling 'release' to be off the mark. It's not a release at all. It's the development series made more usable. 

You're correct that once the development series is branched and there is both a development series and a stabilization branch on it's way to becoming a release it's pretty inevitable that two sets of changes will be needed.   There will need to be process and structure around this so that checks are in place to make sure that changes to one branch are not lost to the other.

I'm not claiming this is any kind of a deal breaker. I do think it's an essential part of any proposed restructuring of our development process that the proposal describe how we would do an actual release and I haven't seen it yet.

Scott K