stable branches (was Re: [PATCH 0/8] maintenance patches)

[Kamil Dudka]

On Monday 04 January 2016 15:17:24 James Youngman wrote:
> c) I'd like input from the other committers and from the principal
> downstream consumers (e.g. Andreas, Kamil) before making a choice,
> since it's the committers who would need to maintain the parallel
> branches and the downstream maintainers who (allegedly) benefit.
> Let's have a data-based discussion about what works for everyone - in
> a separate thread, I'd suggest.

Fedora and RHEL maintainers backport mainly fixes for bugs that are reported 
via Red Hat Bugzilla.  At the same time, we update to the latest upstream 
release in the development version of Fedora, from which the stable Fedora 
releases are branched each 6 months approx.

As an example, these are the findutils versions we currently maintain:

findutils-4.6.0  - in Fedora rawhide (the development version of Fedora)
findutils-4.5.16 - in Fedora 23 (released on November 3rd, 2015)
findutils-4.5.14 - in Fedora 22 (released on May 26th, 2015)
findutils-4.5.11 - in RHEL-7 (released on June 9th, 2014)
findutils-4.4.2  - in RHEL-6 (released on November 9th, 2010)

If there are "stable" branches for upstream findutils, I will be happy to
share any backports that apply, to make them available to other downstream 
distributions with a similar release cycle.  If there is a linear history 
only, it will also work for us.

Kamil