Re: We should get 5.9** out soon

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On 31 March 2022 at 11:47 Daniel Shahaf <d.s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> dana wrote on Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:34 +00:00:
> > On Wed 30 Mar 2022, at 11:51, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> >> Lots of accumulated fixes, but probably the most important is to
> >> un-break line-buffered input (workers/49792), since that problem was
> >> introduced by the 5.8.1 security release.
> 
> I don't think the regression in 5.8.1 is a reason to release a 5.9; it's
> only a reason to release a 5.8.2.  That could have a shorter pre-release
> testing period ("soak"), and wouldn't force people to choose between the
> regression in 5.8.1 and any as-yet-undiscovered regressions 5.9 might
> feature (which is more likely than usual because of how large the
> 5.8→5.9 diff is).

The logic is entirely reasonable, but in practice I think stopgap fixes
are likely just to put things off further.  I think it's worth getting
out 5.9(?) and seeing if there's still a market for backporting non-security
fixes to 5.8.2 --- there may not be.  (This may be the sort of thinking
Bart had in mind.)

We've never required an incompatible change to bump the major number before
(there's often been one anyway), but given there's no single determiner it's
something you might well take into account.

pws