[FFmpeg-devel] release feedback

[Diego Biurrun]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 06:34:23PM -0500, compn wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Mar 2009 20:06:15 +0100, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> >As for the release process, it could surely be improved.  It was bad
> >luck that roundup broke at the time we wanted to have the bug fixing
> >weekend.  I had hoped that more people would be motivated to work on
> >fixing bugs during this weekend.  Some actually did, but the interest
> >was not overwhelming.
> 
> you tried to mix bugfixing with release, this was unexpected for some...
> some just expected a tarball to test and bingo.

What's the problem with focussing on bug fixes every once in a while?

> >The other question is ongoing support for releases.
> >
> >I think we should just port security fixes to the release branch.
> 
> skip that, and use the fixed trunk as a new release.
> 
> we dont support old ffmpeg, we dont support old ffmpeg. how many times
> must this be repeated? is there any problem with a new release that
> fixes a security issue ?

Of course there is a problem.  This new release would have different
behavior, APIs may have come and gone, ABI may have changed.  So you
cannot use it as replacement, you have to backport fixes.

Many distributions have a policy that they apply only security fixes to
their packages.  This is incompatible with replacing one version with a
later one.

> distros have patches for each package anyways. what makes this
> different?

Less duplicated work among distros.

Diego