Eli Zaretskii [27/Jun 10:01am +03] wrote: >> At my site, we use our own emacs-30 branch, and we are continually >> backporting safe fixes from master to our emacs-30 branch. We'll keep >> doing this until emacs-31 is released. We did the same for emacs-29 >> and emacs-28. >> >> We do this so we can get fixes more quickly: when a user reports a bug >> internally, and we go fix it on master, we want to be able to deliver >> the fix to the user immediately rather than wait for the next major >> Emacs release. >> >> So I would love to see the emacs-31 branch stay alive longer upstream. >> That would significantly reduce the need for my site-local branch. > > IOW, you'd like us to do this job for you, in addition to the many > other duties we already have.
I think that Spencer is, rather, envisaging a pooling of both efforts *and* benefits. To look at it the other way, currently other people don't get to benefit from Spencer's site's branch, but if we found a way to maintain it collectively on Savannah, then they would. >> Since we'd use the upstream emacs-31 branch at my site, that would >> help test the backported bugfixes. Happy to help out in any other way >> I can. > > Feel free to come on board and tell when to backport fixes to previous > branches, and then also take care of producing further NN.x release > tarballs from those branches (because backporting fixes without > releasing Emacs with those fixes is just a waste of effort). > > IOW, this is a matter of manpower and resources. We need more of that > to be able to do the followings (in addition to a lot of duties the > head maintainers already have and do, which you as a downstream distro > don't have): > > . examine each bugfix and decide whether it is relevant to older > major releases, and if so, is it safe enough to include there > . produce tarballs from previous branches after enough bugfixes > accumulated (or maybe even after each fix) > > Volunteers are welcome to take over these parts. If Spencer's site's team are doing this work anyway, could we come up with a way to do it together in public? Let's set aside the tarballs part; I am confident I can handle that, it's not very time-consuming and it is ripe for more scripting. It's the maintaining of the branch that's at issue. Maybe backporting *from* Jane Street's branch *to* Savannah's branch would allow us to overcome the problem Stefan describes of not being able to give the fixes enough testing? -- Sean Whitton
