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

[Tom Stellard]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 02:51:05PM -0500, Krzysztof Parzyszek wrote:
> On 4/3/2013 2:36 PM, Tom Stellard wrote:
> >
> >I don't think the length of the release cycle really matters too much.
> 
> It does.  Someone has to do the work---the effort goes to either to
> the ongoing development or to the maintenance releases.  A short
> release cycle generally means less "free time" in the main
> development.  Also, if the maintenance release goes out of service
> when a main release is made, then the users may still be forced to
> switch---the shorter the release cycle, the more likely this is to
> happen.
>

I understand this. The point I was trying to make was that regardless
of the length of the development cycle, it is still necessary to have
dot releases.

> 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.

Also, I think it is in the LLVM project's best interest to encourage
users to contribute bug fixes back to the project.  If projects are
required to maintain their own bug fix versions of LLVM, then they have
little incentive to contribute the fixes back.

-Tom