[LLVMdev] RFC: Bug fix releases for 3.3 and beyond

[Tom Stellard]

Hi,

I would really like to see the LLVM project start to make official bug fix
releases (e.g. 3.3.1, 3.3.2, etc.).  I think that this would be useful for a
lot of the users of LLVM, especially projects that use LLVM as a library.
I am willing to help maintain bug fix releases, and I'm wondering if
this is something that the LLVM project would officially support with
a stable SVN branch and by hosting the official stable tarball releases.

I realize that maintaining stable branches is a lot of work, so I would
like to come up with a procedure that makes maintaining these branches
as easy as possible.  Here is a rough idea of what I had in
mind, but please suggest alternatives if you know of a better way:

1. Developer fixes a bug or makes a change that he/she thinks would make
a good candidate for the stable branch.  Commits would require approval
from the Code Owner in order to be backported to stable.

2a. When the developer commits that change, he/she adds to the end of the
commit message something like:

Note: This is a candidate for the stable branch

2b. Alternatively, if a user discovers a bug in a stable release that has
been fixed in ToT, he/she could request to have the fix backported.

3. The developer would be encouraged, but not required to cherry-pick the
commit to the stable branch.  The stable maintainer would periodically
search the commit logs and cherry-pick any commits that had been missed,
consulting with the author of the commit in the case of a difficult
merge conflict.

4. After some interval of time, the stable maintainer would announce
plans for a stable release and testing would begin.

What does everyone think?  Would something like this be doable?

Thanks,
Tom