[yocto] release branches and package upgrades

[Bruce Ashfield]

On 14-02-07 07:31 AM, Adrian Dudau wrote:
> 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.

If that is the remaining example, the lttng-modules update was
discussed on the mailing list, and since it fixed a deadlock in
the 3.10.x kernel versions the new version was pulled in to fix
the severe issue.

see: [OE-core] [PATCH 1/2] lttng-modules: Update revision to grab last 
bugfix releases

On the oe-core mailing list.

What exactly broke in your case ? The build ?

Bruce

>
>>
>>> 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
>>
>
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