[Dnsmasq-discuss] Stable releases v. development releases.

[Tomas Hozza]

----- Original Message -----
> Thus far, dnsmasq has not maintained separate stable and development
> branches. One reason for this is that there's been a pretty strong
> policy of backwards-compatibility, so the penalty for upgrading to the
> latest release is low: we've almost certainly not broken your config, or
> changed behaviour. On the other hand, sometimes fixes for bugs have been
> delayed by work on features.
> 
> It looks like there are a couple of regressions in 2.69 which need early
> correction. The dnsmasq way of this would be to release 2.70 rapidly
> with fixes, but once serious development starts on the next set of
> features, the ability to do that is lost. The alternative would be to
> open stable and development branches, and make a 2.69.1 bugfix release.
> There's some cost in doing that, of course. More repo complexity and
> work in moving fixes into the development as well as stable releases.
> Git makes that much easier than before, of course.
> 
> I'm interested in opinions for and against the status-quo or a new
> stable/devel split.

>From Fedora point of view I would welcome the stable branch (version)
that will be maintained for some time and have the development branch
separate.

It is already against Fedora updates policy to bring new functionality
into already released version, it if could change the behaviour. Therefore
dnsmasq 2.69 with DNSSEC is still in Fedora rawhide and will be included
in the next Fedora version (21).

If you decide to keep the current style of development, we can live with
that, too. However the current state makes it harder if one want to maintain
some released version of dnsmasq and from time to time just fix a bug.
Although you are sticking to backward-compatibility, sometimes one (especially
some distro) don't want to rebase to the latest version as it includes
new features that are not necessarily needed.


Regards,
-- 
Tomas Hozza
Software Engineer - EMEA ENG Developer Experience

PGP: 1D9F3C2D
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