[Mesa-dev] so the development model is working?

[Bridgman, John]

> From: ... Brian Paul
> Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 12:17 AM
> To: Dave Airlie
> Cc: mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
...
> If you're concerned about producing a stable driver, why 
> aren't you making more fixes to the 7.8/stable branch, 
> whether by cherry picking or whatever?  That's the whole 
> point of it.  Master is not a stable branch.
> 
> Look above and see if you can guess why I prefer doing merges 
> to cherry-pick.?  I'd rather do 3 merges vs. 20+ 
> cherry-picks.  Cherry picking quickly becomes a PITA once you 
> get beyond a handful of patches or one commit per week or so.

Quick question; 

Dave's comments implied that there is a policy against fixing bugs in master then cherry picking 'em to stable; your comments implied master-first plus cherry pick is OK but you feel that fixing in stable and merging back to master is a *better* way of working. 

Is it fair to say that if a developer is working in master and notices a potential bug fix then it's OK to fix in master and cherry-pick that fix to one or more stable branches afterwards, but if the "primary task" is fixing a bug (particularly a big discovered in stable) then fixing first in the stable branch is preferred ? 

re: the overall development model, my main question would be whether continuing work on a release branch after the initial release is really still required now that we have quarterly major releases for all the major components. 

JB