github release procedure

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, January 03, 2013 21:42:37 Johannes Pfau wrote:
> What I am most concerned about are the timespans discussed:
> "I propose to go for a yearly release of the
> stable branches with one year support (In the beginning)."
> 
> The wiki discussion page even mentions "I don't think 4 months are a
> ridiculously long time for staging if the release is made every 3
> years."

That makes it sound like they want the current stuff to be marked as staging 
and then have some other release that sits around for a very long time being 
treated as somehow more stable than the staging branch. In general, there's 
nothing about bug fixing which is stable, and separating out bug fixes between a 
more stable branch and a less stable one doesn't make all that much sense. 
Separating out new features and not putting them in the "stable" branch makes 
sense, but that really doesn't make sense for bugs.

Also, the name "staging" implies that it's purely for preparing a release, in 
which case keeping it around makes _no_ sense. Not to mention, as already 
mentioned, it would make more sense to simply create a new branch for each 
release to begin with than have a staging branch if that's what it's for. And 
if that's not what it's for, then it's a horrible name.

- Jonathan M Davis