[yocto] release branches and package upgrades

[Burton, Ross]

On 7 February 2014 09:47, Adrian Dudau <Adrian.Dudau at enea.com> wrote:
> I would like to understand Yocto Project's policy on the
> release/maintenance branches (dora,dylan etc). My understanding was that
> these were considered stable branches and only bugfixes and general
> fixes that would not affect functionality were merged onto them.
>
> However, lately, we identified patches that upgrade package versions and
> introduced some problems in our distro. We had a hard time identifying
> the source of these problems, since we expected the maintenance branch
> not to change in this way.
>
> Here are a couple of these patches as example in poky/dora branch:
> 50574e41b882c3f2633f69486593eaea54d8e554
> 63335c87c1904287cdd5fd28d0ad6a73e985f2a4
>
> My question is: are patches like these normal and should we expect to
> get version upgrades for packages on the maintenance branches as well?

Your understanding of the policy is correct.  Version upgrades have
happened in exceptional circumstances (say, a security fix which is
very hard to backport).  Robert should explain the rationale for those
upgrades.

Ross