Re: musl 0.9.14 released

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 04:10:03PM +0200, Luca Barbato wrote:
> On 24/09/13 15:51, John Spencer wrote:
> >> Sometime soon I also want to focus on what the development and release
> >> model post-1.0 will be, especially whether we'll aim to maintain a
> >> 'stable' branch with minimal new features alongside new development.
> > 
> > having a stable branch which only gets backports of bugfixes makes sense
> > if we aim for inclusion in conservative distributions.

And embedded developers -- they don't want to waste their time heavily
testing a new version with lots of additional features they don't need
just to fix a bug that might affect their products.

> > if nothing else, it signals that we care about stability.

Yes, this is probably the most compelling reason.

> > otoh it's much more work to maintain...

Agreed. Hopefully we can minimize this.

> If you want a stable branch I found _really_ useful having tags such as
> 
> CC: musl-stable@musl-libc.org

How is this a "tag"?

> But you need at least 2 people doing the actual backporting weekly.

I'm skeptical that it would be that much work. Unlike lots of
projects, musl's codebase intentionally avoids a lot of
interdependence between modules. If, for example, 80% of bug fix
commits apply cleanly to both branches, they could just be committed
to both directly, and that would probably leave, on average, less than
one commit per week that needs to be backported but doesn't apply
directly.

If the majority of post-1.0 effort is spent on adding features and
simplifying/refactoring existing code, I would tend to expect even
fewer bug-fix commits, but the refactoring might make a higher
percentage of them require backporting effort.

Rich