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

Sean Silva silvas at purdue.edu
Wed Apr 3 16:35:59 PDT 2013


On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 5:44 PM, Tom Stellard <tom at stellard.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 05:12:42PM -0400, Sean Silva wrote:
> > 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.
> >
>
> I agree with you here.  I think the changes that end up in the stable
> branch should be ones that somebody cares about and is willing to put at
> least some effort into getting it backported.  This may be developers or
> it may be external projects that need a bug-fix, but if a developer
> doesn't think backporting a fix is important than they shouldn't be
> forced to do it.
>

I think some developers (myself included) were a bit apprehensive of your
initial proposal because it made it sound like the onus was on us, the LLVM
developers, to try to identify all the patches that should be funnelled
into stable dot-releases for downstream. This is a lot more reasonable.

So my understanding of the discussion so far is that really all we need is
a way for downstream projects to request that certain bugfixes be rolled
into a dot-release that is officially backed by LLVM and which distros are
expected to package and upgrade to. Also necessary is the infrastructure to
qualify such releases in order to make sure that nothing breaks.


>
> >
> > 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.
> >
>
> I'm not quite sure if I follow you here.  How would this help with
> bugs that are found after an "official" release.
>

Sorry, that was poorly worded. By "official" I meant "a release that
distros would be expected to package". I.e. not just a tarball put together
by some developer, but something that is recognized as having backing by
the LLVM project. So with this meaning a dot-release would count
as "official".


>
>
> > 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.
> >
>
> A faster release cycle would help for new features, and I think it
> would be great to have a more automated release process, but I think
> there would still be value in dot releases.  Mainly for giving users the
> chance
> to stabilize their projects with a stable version of LLVM and know that
> if they found an LLVM bug, they would have the opportunity to fix it.
>
>
I'm not aware of any issues where users don't feel they can contribute
patches back to us, and that sounds like an orthogonal issue.

-- Sean Silva
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