Patch policy for branches

[Andreas Jaeger]

Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com> writes:

> In the past, we've had a confusing situation for users, in which
> "upgrading" from one branch to another could result in known
> regressions.  In particular, consider our current situation:
>
> * GCC 4.0.2 is the latest release on the 4.0 branch.
>
> * GCC 4.1 will be released soon.
>
> * GCC 4.0.3 will be released at some time in the future.
>
> Suppose that after GCC 4.1, we fix a bug, applying the fix to both the
> 4.0 and 4.1 branches.  Then, we release GCC 4.0.3, before GCC 4.1.1.
> The result is then that a user who uses GCC 4.0.3, and upgrades to GCC
> 4.1.0, sees a regression for the bug in question.  That seems confusing.

Did you really hear that many complaints that it's worth to take care
of this?  

If we have a minor release of 4.1 every two month that means a time of
less than two month where a user first updates to 4.0.3 and then to
4.1.0. I doubt that users update in that way so often that we have to
take care of that.

On the other hand, I know of users that have several branches
installed to test both old and new compilers and those might get hit
by this,

Andreas
-- 
 Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/
  SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
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