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

[David Chisnall]

On 3 Apr 2013, at 18:42, Sean Silva <silvas at purdue.edu> wrote:

> I'm not sure how difficult it actually is to follow ToT compared to one huge pain when upgrading for our full releases. I think it would be valuable to obtain feedback from projects that rely on LLVM as to how they go about integrating LLVM into their project and how our releases (and potentially dot-releases) would integrate into their development process.

In FreeBSD, we ship the release with our release builds and periodically pull in head snapshots from time to time into head.  We occasionally cherry-pick fixes if they address problems that have been encountered by us, and we have some out-of-tree changes (although we're trying to minimise that).  

In another project, we end up with big tangles of #ifdefs to work around API changes (some of which are for useful improvements, many of which are just gratuitous churn, but that's another story) and try to track ToT where possible, because it minimises the headaches when a new release is branched.  In theory, we have working code for the new release, and we can just delete #ifdef branches when we drop support for another branch.  

David