[yocto] release branches and package upgrades

[Adrian Dudau]

Hi Bruce,

On fre, 2014-02-07 at 08:42 -0500, Bruce Ashfield wrote:
> 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 ?

The build went fine, it was the actual lttng application that broke on
some ARM targets.

And we had another issue related to this: the lttng source mirrors on
yoctoproject.org/mirror/sources/ weren't updated after the version bump.
So it happened that when the upstream lttng git went down we couldn't
build anymore, since we had the same old sources mirrored. But this is a
minor thing and we got it working.

--Adrian

> 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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> > yocto at yoctoproject.org
> > https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto
> >
>