[Python-Dev] Maintaining old releases

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Aug 13, 2008, at 1:53 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

>>> Because there won't typically be sufficient testing and release
>>> infrastructure to allow arbitrary bug fixes to be committed on the
>>> branch. The buildbots are turned off, and nobody tests the release
>>> candidate, no Windows binaries are provided - thus, chances are very
>>> high that a bug fix release for some very old branch will be *worse*
>>> than the previous release, rather than better.
>>
>> Second, I don't think this is true. People using those patch
>> level releases will test and report bugs if they are introduced
>> by such backports.
>
> They might be using releases, but they are *not* using the subversion
> maintenance branches. Do you know anybody who regularly checks out the
> 2.4 maintenance branch and tests it?
>
> So at best, people will only report bugs *after* the release was made,
> meaning that there is a realistic chance that the release itself  
> breaks
> things.

Sure, but this is just as true for security fixes.  The only thing the  
policy buys us is fewer /possibilities/ of breakage.  I'm not  
discounting that as worthwhile, but qualitatively, there's no  
difference between non-security fixes and security fixes, as far as  
our Q/A process goes.

> My problem is that this backporting is not systematic. It's arbitrary
> whether patches get backported or not. Part of the problem is that
> it is/was also unclear whether there ever will be another release made
> out of 2.4. When 2.4.4 was released, Anthony announced, in
>
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-October/069326.html
>
> "This will be the last planned release in the Python 2.4 series"
>
> So anybody committing to the 2.4 branch after that should have  
> expected
> that the patches will never get released.

There's a difference between never being released, and unavailable in  
the source repository.

- -Barry

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