X11R6.8.2 maintenance release plans and call for comments.

[Torrey Lyons]

At 5:21 PM -0400 10/26/04, Adam Jackson wrote:
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>On Tuesday 26 October 2004 15:13, Jim Gettys wrote:
>>  Kristian, Donny, Torry, Mike, Roland, Daniel, Alan and Leon have been
>>  discussing details of stable release policies in the Release Wrangler's
>>  list; we need to strike a good balance of convenience vs. rigor here.
>>  A serious strawman of policy was written by Kristian here:
>  > http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/release-wranglers/2004-October/001070.html
>
>I thought Kristian's proposal was pretty solid.  Torrey had raised the
>objection that the requirement for a bug number for each change might be
>excessive.  Personally bugzilla is so integrated with my workflow that I
>don't see this as an issue.  I would at minimum like for each change to
>include _some_ external reference, be that a link to a message in the mail
>archives, or a distributor bug number, or whatever.  I can deal with that
>being a SHOULD rather than a MUST though.

Yes, that is what I had in mind. A common scenario for me is that I 
get private email reporting a bug which I fix quickly in the top of 
tree. I always include a note on who reported the bug in the 
ChangeLog and commit message. I find it burdensome to have to create 
a special bug in Bugzilla simply for the purpose of being able to 
back port each fix when I've already well documented everything.

A more fundamental question is whether changes to the 6.8.x branch 
require approval or merely must follow guidelines. If each change 
needs to be approved by the release manager or committee before being 
made, then a Bugzilla entry is necessary for tracking. Personally I 
would prefer a model of the person responsible for an area being able 
to use their judgement on when a particular fix fits into a clearly 
specified set of guidelines on what is appropriate for the stable 
branch. Gray areas would be referred to a wider audience for 
discussion.

--Torrey