Re: Stable vs. Default branch

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Oct-2011, Rik wrote:

| So, why don't you apply your patch to the default branch and we can
| transplant it to stable after the 3.4.3 release.

If you are going to transplant it anyway, then you might as well just
wait until after the release and apply it to the stable branch.

My point was that I think we've been doing too much development on the
stable branch.  Even though most of the changes have been bug fixes,
my guess is that they aren't all simple and safe fixes and could cause
trouble.  I've certainly applied plenty of my own patches to stable
during this release cycle, so I'm not pointing fingers.  But for the
future, I'd like for us to have a clearer idea of what it is exactly
that we want the stable branch to be.  My position in the past has
been that it should be reserved for fixing regressions only, not for
all bug or Matlab compatibility fixes, but I remember getting some
opposition to that idea.

So what do others think?  Is fixing regressions only too restrictive?
It seems to me that it would help to make sure that the stable release
really is stable.  And we would spend less time worrying about fixing
bugs on the stable branch, because I don't expect too many
regressions.  Then we can spend more time on the default branch and
maybe get new major releases out more frequently.

jwe