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Jeff writes: > When you submit patches to a release branch, you need try harder to make > sure they will not break other ports. It is *critical* that a minor release > not take a step backwards like that. In practice, the submitter may not be able to know this in all cases, but may still have a strong belief that a patch is needed to fix a problem that is found at the last minute. The risk is largest for patches that are proposed for the release branch but have never been in the mainline. But the case you're talking about here is interesting because HJ's patch had been in the mainline, together with Richard's patches to fix HJ's patches. But HJ didn't seem aware of that. We don't really have a system to manage this kind of dependency. In this case, HJ knew he put in a fix to a problem, and knew it had been checked in a while ago (so it is reasonable for him to think it was a safe and tested patch), but there wasn't an easy way to "cross-reference" the fact that it needed later fixes. I don't know if there's a simple way to keep better track of these things or not.