On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 12:27:42AM +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote: >... *All* releases seem to have the > predictions that they are useless, should be skipped because the next > release will be so much better in way X or Y, etc.; I think the question > of how widely used a release series turned out to be in practice may be > relevant when deciding after how many releases the branch is closed, but > simply dropping a release series after the branch is created is pretty > much always a mistake. (When we rebranded 3.1 as 3.2 in the hopes of > getting a stable C++ ABI, I think that also with hindsight was a mistake, > given that the aim was that the stable ABI would also be the correct > documented ABI but more ABI bugs have continued to turn up since then.)
I agree. To me, the only issue with 4.2 is the performance drop due to aliasing issues; whether to address that by reverting patches to have 4.1 performance + 4.1 bugs, or by backporting fixes from 4.3, I would leave for the experts to decide (except that I don't think it's shippable without some solution to the performance drop).
