On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 08:20:02AM -0400, John Baldwin wrote: > On Thursday, June 14, 2012 12:30:19 am Adrian Chadd wrote: > > On 13 June 2012 21:26, Mark Linimon <lini...@lonesome.com> wrote: > > > On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 08:50:24AM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote: > > >> The only way that this would really work is if there were dedicated > > >> sustaining engineers working on actively backporting code, testing it, > > >> committing it, etc. > > > > > > I'm going to agree with Garrett here. IMHO we've reached (or surpassed) > > > the limit of what is reasonable to ask volunteers to commit their spare > > > time to. This is doubly true when we have more than one "stable" branch. > > > > I totally concur. > > This is why I think we need fewer branches so that there is less merging to > do. Even in the bad old 4.x days developers would merge things (especially > driver updates) from HEAD back to 4.x. If we move X.0 releases farther > apart then developers will still MFC things, the issue is that they don't > want to MFC to 2 stable branches.
I do not find it cumbersome to merge to two branches. What I find quite demotivating is the conflicts and drifted KPI/API. So my usual reaction to the attempt to merge to stable/8 which fails due to conflicts is just remove the MFC reminder. I do sometimes reconsider the choice if explicitely asked by somebody, but I really prefer to not do risky commits to old and presumably stable branches. I do not have much incentive to merge to 8 anyway, except a warm feeling of providing some relief to a peer. So having long-living stable/8 and not having stable/9 means not doing some merges at all, instead of doing just one merge. YMMV.
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