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

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 02:08:42PM -0500, Krzysztof Parzyszek wrote:
> On 4/2/2013 11:51 AM, Tom Stellard wrote:
> >
> >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.
> 
> Does this really make sense with a 6 month release cycle for the
> main releases?  Who are the customers who would be able to request a
> dot release?

Yes, it does. Consider miscompiles as an example.


> Each additional bugfix release carries a significant cost.  Who is
> going to be investigating bugs in prior releases, especially if the
> problem can no longer be reproduced with the development branch?

Bugfix releases and maintainance of a release branch are somewhat
separate issues. The former requires the latter, but not the other way
around. Having a common base for cherry picking fixes would help e.g.
FreeBSD (and NetBSD in the near future) a lot.

Joerg