Point releases for the GNU C Library

Posted Oct 17, 2017 20:28 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Point releases for the GNU C Library by NightMonkey
Parent article: Point releases for the GNU C Library

The glibc community as a whole is lively: it's safe to say that it is more active than it has ever been.

It's just that nobody wants to do the relatively boring scutwork of doing point releases when the decision about when to make them is totally arbitrary, since *every commit* on the stable branches is meant to be equally suitable for use.

Point releases for the GNU C Library

Posted Oct 18, 2017 8:15 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

Then maybe have "patch Tuesdays" and do a point release every month (if there was any commit on the stable branch). Now, of course the problem would be that Fedora would use 2.27.1, Ubuntu would use 2.27.2, SuSE would use 2.27.3, Debian stable would be on 2.27.4, Debian testing on 2.27.5, Debian unstable on 2.27.6, the next Fedora on 2.27.7, the next Ubuntu on 2.27.8, etc...

Point releases for the GNU C Library

Posted Oct 19, 2017 7:30 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

That just means a monthly point release is too frequent to be useful. I suspect the right balance between freshness and convergence on common versions (to share QA and field experience) would be around 4 per year, including major releases, and taking spring/autumn distro releasing into account (always do releasing about a month before those, and the two others mid-release).

As for numbering WillyTarreau posted a good automated recipe. Excellent software engineering as usual, Willy !