Re: Plan for the 5.9 branch

[Daniel Shahaf <d.s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

dana wrote on Tue, 18 Feb 2020 13:40 -0600:
> On 17 Feb 2020, at 03:19, Daniel Shahaf <d.s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 17 Feb 2020, at 03:19, Daniel Shahaf <d.s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > What degree of support/compatibility promises will they
> > come with — comparable to a -dev/-test release or to a regular release?  Etc.  
> 
> Re: compatibility, as a rule i would suggest that patch releases under this
> system should not contain anything that Debian/Ubuntu wouldn't be comfortable
> pulling into one of their (non-rolling) releases. Maybe that's slightly too
> strict in practice, but i think that's a reasonable goal at least.
> 
> Re: support, i'm not sure i even know what promises we make for stable
> releases now, lol

For one, we implicitly promise compatibility: if something works
in 5.8, users are allowed to assume it will work in 5.9 as well.
(Which by extension means bugs in it will be considered release
blockers)

Now, suppose we add a new feature in March, then in April make
a release off master that ships that feature, and then in May we find
a bug in that feature.  Are we allowed to break compatibility with the
the April version of the feature in order to fix the bug?

If the feature hadn't appeared in a release, the answer would be an
unequivocal "Yes".  Given that it has appeared in a release, do we promise
to users of that release that we won't break compatibility with what
they have?  If we don't promise that, fewer users will install the
additional releases; but if we do make that promise, we'll have less
time to find bugs in features before we're committed to support those
features going forward.

Cheers,

Daniel