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

[Sean Silva]

On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Tom Stellard <tom at stellard.net> wrote:
>
>
> > How many customers out there are shipping their LLVM-based products
> > without actually including the LLVM sources?  If they do include the
> > sources, they may fix the bug locally, especially if they are
> > capable of investigating what the problem is.
> >
>
> Projects that wants to be distributed as part of a Linux or *BSD
> distribution really can't ship their own custom version of LLVM
> with their project.  They need to use the LLVM version that is provided
> by distributions, so this rules out this kind of solution.
>
>
Your initial proposal seems to be trying to cast a very wide net (affecting
possible every LLVM developer) in the hope of getting patches needed by
downstream rolled into stable dot-releases. It may be more appropriate to
let the needs of the external projects drive the stable branch than for the
LLVM developers to try to guess what might be good to have on a stable
branch. i.e. it may be better for the needs of external projects to "pull"
just the patches they need into a stable branch than for LLVM developers to
globally try to "push" patches into a stable branch in the hopes that one
of those patches will be needed by downstream.


On another level, it seems like what you are asking for is just an easier
way for downstream projects that run into bugs to get those bugfixes rolled
into a packaged release in a timely fashion. Is this correct? If so, I'm
sure it would be possible to set up a fairly simple protocol for getting
just the code they need into an "official" release.

You also appear to have suggested pushing new C API changes and possibly
new target features (!), and in light of this the above statement could be
extended to "get new C API and target features into a packaged release in a
timely fashion", which seems awfully close to simply being a way for code
owners to push new code into "official dot-releases" in circumvention of
our release schedule. While having such a side-channel may be pragmatically
useful I can't help but feel that it is a bit hackish and would be better
addressed by improving the automation of our release process (and the
infrastructure supporting it) to enable a faster release schedule.

-- Sean Silva
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20130403/ab71deed/attachment.html>