How to track the backport of important fixes?

[Elvis Angelaccio]

2016-03-09 20:36 GMT+01:00 Thomas Pfeiffer <thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org>:

> 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.


Even if the stable branch is end-of-life?


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

That's exactly the problem. The bug happened when the Applications/15.08
branch had already seen its last bugfix release (15.08.3). We actually had
to even ask a respin of the Applications/15.12 tarball, to include the fix.

Just for reference, this is the fix we are talking about:
https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/126358/

Cheers,
Elvis


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