[libvirt] libvirt stable releases

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Fri Apr 27 08:15:50 UTC 2012


On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 01:12:58PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 04/26/2012 12:39 PM, Cole Robinson wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > An idea we've kicked around for awhile in Red Hat/Fedora land is doing
> > official libvirt stable releases, but nothing ever took shape. The idea was
> > brought up again recently and I've offered to help get something going.
> > 
> > I've pushed an upstream v0.9.11-maint branch with a bunch of patches
> > cherry-picked to libvirt 0.9.11. Shortly I'll be cutting a 0.9.11.1 and
> > pushing it to the website, like other releases.
> 
> How often do you plan to cut releases on the current maint branch?  Once
> a month or so?
> 
> What's the preferred method for marking a patch as a candidate for
> inclusion on the branch?
> 
> Right now, it looks like we are using cherry-pick -x to populate the
> branch; maybe someday it would be worth swapping over to the style used
> by the kernel where you base candidate patches directly off the stable
> branch, then merge the branch into master for development, so that
> master is always a superset of all commits in stable; but that implies
> using a merge paradigm whereas our current style is that mainline is
> linear history.  Food for thought, but certainly not anything worth
> changing right away until we have more experience with how popular the
> stable branch turns out to be.

One reason why the kernel does that is that their master can be quite a
fast changing place & potentially unstable, so hard to track when you
are doing development. Conceptually though I don't really like that
because of the non-linearity of history and the horrificness of merge
commits[1]. In any case I think our 'master' branch is stable enough that
it does not cause too many problems for people developing new patches.

Daniel

[1] My dislike of merge commits has grown tremendously having worked on
    OpenStack now. Navigating history & tracking down regressions is so
    much more unpleasant with merges.
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