[LLVMdev] Policy for applying fixes to released branches?

[Tom Stellard]

On 09/10/2014 06:57 AM, Dan Liew wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering what the policy is for applying fixes to released branches.
>

For 3.4.x, the policy was that release manager (me) was the only one who 
could commit patches to 3.4 branch.  However, for 3.5, I would be in 
favor of allowing anyone to commit patches as long as they meet the 
normal criteria, which is:
1. Approval from code owner
2. Approval from release manager
3. No shared library ABI/API breakages

> In particular I have fix that would be useful to have in LLVM 3.5. I
> recently found and fixed a bug [1] in the way CMake files are
> generated by the Autoconf/Makefile system and fixed this in r217484.
>

If you cc me on the commit email, I will take a look an approve it.

-Tom

> I figured it would be more sensible to ask about this in a thread
> separate from [2] because this is a much more general question.
>
> So what should I do here?
>
> Should I also commit this patch to the branches/release_35 or am I not
> allowed to do this and instead should downstream (e.g. Debian, Arch..
> etc) just apply the patch when building their packages?
>
> Even if I add the patch to the release branch I don't think most
> distributions will get it because they'll probably use the tarballs
> which won't have the patch. I'm pretty sure it would be unhelpful
> rebuild the tarballs because downstream won't know that they need to
> rebuild their packages.
>
> @Sylvestre : IIRC you maintain LLVM Debian packages so I figured your
> insight would be helpful.
>
>
> [1] http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=20884
> [2] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-September/076573.html
>
> Thanks,
> Dan.
>