Re: Release 0.26: branching

[Matthias Klose <doko at ubuntu dot com>]

On 09.11.2015 17:27, Tristan Gingold wrote:
> Hello,
>
> there was a lot of work on binutils recently (nice!).
> Previously, I tried to find a period of calm to create
> a release branch, but I wasnât able to this year.
>
> So, how to process ?  Is it reasonable to ask developers to
> be quiet ?  From my experience, it doesnât work very well
> because we all want to push our new features in the next
> release, so instead of being quiet developers hurry up.
>
> I could also create a branch from a past point, but all
> the bug fixes wonât be in the new release, so there would
> be additional backport work.
>
> So, this is just a call for avoiding submitting new
> features, just to aim at a new release.

Hi Tristan,

thanks for bringing this up, and for seeking for a path to a release.  Not sure 
how to address this, however would it be possible to have more time based 
releases?  Binutils somehow had a yearly release schedule, releasing in "summer" 
for the more recent releases, switching to "late summer" for the past releases. 
 We are in late autumn now.  Doing the binutils branch only after GCC enters 
stage3 makes sense too.  Having an end of year release sounds fine, but if this 
then again slips past the GCC releases typically done in March/April every year, 
people probably start relying more on trunk builds again?

Is there any outstanding work to be done for a 2.26 release? I see some work has 
started for new architectures like ARMv8.1 and POWER9. Will these be completed 
on the branch as well?  I personally would like to see some new options for ld 
being accepted for gold as well.

Three weeks ago I switched the current Ubuntu development release to use 
binutils trunk, finding four or five regressions up to now without doing a full 
test rebuild.  I'm planning to do that for Debian as well now that the 2.26 
branch is there.  Do other distros have experience using the recent trunk?

Thanks, Matthias