How to track the backport of important fixes?

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Monday, 7 March 2016 00:02:36 CET Elvis Angelaccio wrote:
> Hi,
> there is a problem that hit me recently that I would like to discuss in
> this new list.
> 
> The issue is the following: due to incompatibilities between different
> release schedules, it may happen that a serious bug is introduced on a dead
> branch (i.e. a branch that won't see any new upstream release).
> 
> In these cases, distributions who are stuck to those dead branches (because
> of some policy X) are supposed to backport the fixes. If this does not
> happen, the users of those distributions will be affected by serious bugs
> and this results in a bad reputation for KDE.
> 
> This happened recently with Ark and Kubuntu.
> The release of KXMLGui 5.17 exposed a serious bug in (at least) Ark and
> Kate. Since at that time the Applications/15.08 branch was end-of-life, the
> bugfix was released on master and (most) distributions got it with the
> following Application 15.12 release.
> 
> However, at least Kubuntu has been stuck with Ark < 15.12 and KXMLGui >=
> 5.17, and their users get the Ark process to hang when closing the app.

I just talked to two KDE developers and this is what I got from the 
conversation was that the situation above simply should not have happened.

Any bugs that happen in a specific version should be fixed in that stable 
branch. The only valid reason why a bug is only fixed in Master is if the fix 
implies a change which is too invasive to ship in a bug fix release. In that 
case it cannot really be backported by distributions anyway, however.

So our advice to distributions would be: If you become aware of a major bug 
that gets fixed only in Master and not in the stable branch, ask the developers 
to fix it also in the stable branch. It is our job to backport fixes, not yours. 
Developers know that, but they might forget or be too lazy occasionally. Don't 
let them get away with that ;)

If you always ship the latest bugfix release from the stable branch, you should 
not have to backport anything.