On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Takahiro Kambe wrote:
I know there is the way squid project's patch file maintainous policy, maybe fast and low cost release of patches.
Main priority yes.
(And I give unstinted prase to active work of squid development.)
Thanks!
Would you please think of "Packager-Friendly release scheme"?
Friendly is a matter of definiton.
It's true that it is annoying to some that the patches is updated, certainly so on cosmetic fixes such as the one in cachemgr.c, but most often the patch updates are quite critical in nature (fixing bugs in the published patch) and the old patch should no longer be used or referenced. For us it is a feature that this breaks distfiles, as it prevents rebuilds using the broken patch.
IMHO package maitainers should only include the patches seen absolutely required by your QA of the packaged release. Generally you should wait until the next release making both yours and our life easier. For package maintainers the patches is mainly provided in case your QA policy does not allow updating to the new STABLE release and requires backporting of the relevant changes after the new release is published.
We try to keep a relatively short release cycle in STABLE releases when there is critical issues. Longer if there has only been cosmetic/minor fixes which most people can live without. We are also open to feedback if this process seems to be delayed too much. Usually there is some good reason like suspected problems with one of the patches, but sometimes we simply forget that such long time have passed.
Regards Henrik
