[yocto] release branches and package upgrades

[Adrian Dudau]

Hi Paul,

On fre, 2014-02-07 at 10:28 +0000, Paul Eggleton wrote:
> 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 bad. I mixed our branches up and thought that was introduced on dora
as well. It is not, you are right. 
However, the lttng-modules version upgrade (commit
50574e41b882c3f2633f69486593eaea54d8e554) that broke things still
stands. 

>  
> > 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

Thank you for the link. It is good to know that this is not normal
procedure and that we can rely on the stability of the branch.  It makes
sense to only merge critical fixes. Version upgrades can (and will)
break things. 

> 
> Cheers,
> Paul
>