[yocto] release branches and package upgrades

[Paul Eggleton]

Hi Adrian,

On Friday 07 February 2014 09:47:56 Adrian Dudau 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

Is that second revision correct? I don't see an upgrade of powertop to 2.5 on 
the dora branch.
 
> My question is: are patches like these normal and should we expect to
> get version upgrades for packages on the maintenance branches as well?

No, it is unusual to do recipe version upgrades in stable branches. For 
reference, here is a page I wrote on the wiki which describes how the stable 
branches should be managed:

https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Stable_branch_maintenance

Cheers,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre