On Tue, 15 Oct 2013, Marc Balmer wrote:
Well, you are in contradiction to our guide, which under http://www.netbsd.org/releases/release-map.html#current states that "NetBSD-current is the main development branch".
NetBSD-current the main development branch for things that we know we want, and that we are prepared to support for a long time, and that mostly work. If any of those tests fail, then I'd say that the code should not be in -current, but could be in a branch or in pkgsrc or in some third party tree.
In the case of kernel Lua, some people are not convinced that we want it, and some people are not convinced that the API is stable enough that we should commit to long-term compatibility for it.
Although I think that developing in the main -current tree is acceptable (especially if users are told not to expect as much future compatibility as for most other parts of NetBSD), I would have preferred to see development in a branch. It's certainly not the clear-cut "no need for a branch" situation that you seem to think.
--apb (Alan Barrett)