Re: 2.2 missing features

Sascha Schumann (sas@schell.de)
Sun, 18 Oct 1998 09:13:13 +0200 (CEST)


On Sun, 18 Oct 1998, Jeff Lightfoot wrote:

> With Michael Mueller's port of Dynamic IP hack (RST-provoking,...) to
> 2.1.125 from 2.0.3x, I began wondering how many other features are going to
> mysteriously disappear when 2.2 comes out.
>
> Are there many other features we need to work on porting to 2.1 that are
> currently in 2.0?

Hopefully not.

>
> What can we do to keep this from happening in the 2.3 to 2.4/3.0 conversion?
> Would it be reasonable to ask that there be patches for both stable and
> development before a feature is added to the stable branch?

Something would be really wrong, if this would be the normal situation.
The stable tree shouldn't be touched unless there is a bug to fix. New
features have to go into the development tree, not into the stable one.

Backports of features (e.g. modular sound system) are contradictory to
this. Their benefit is obvious: The backported code has undergone
(hopefully) some tests from the people using the development tree which
will probably hit you, because of some minor differences between stable
and development version.

Backports are mosten times done on someone's demand; they are a sign of
problems in the development process, they would be unnecassary, if the
progress would be fast enough to satisfy the demand (at least out of the
perspective of this someone).

I don't want to comment on the ``Forwardport'' of features; IIRC the
dynamic source address rewriting hack has gone first into dev, was then
integrated into the stable tree and enhanced there.

Sascha

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