Re: the setrlimit changes in glibc 2.1.3

[Thorsten Kukuk <kukuk at suse dot de>]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 13, Roland McGrath wrote:

> So I think the real question here is, what warranted this kind of change in
> a "bug-fix" release?  I think folks around here have gotten pretty unclear
> on the concept of maintenance releases, and everybody's playing fast and loose.
> This is just not the way to operate.  That's why we have a development
> branch, for pete's sake.  Are we going to have to add another level of ".x"
> to the versions to get a truly conservative maintenance release branch?
> 
> And, Mark: I'm afraid the realities of packaging systems (and of humans)
> make it hopelessly unwise to attempt to have "the right thing" for anyone
> be to upgrade their shared libraries differently than they upgrade their
> development environment.

I think the biggest problem is another: We need to much time
for bug fix releases and the development branch. Why not make
much ofter "bug-fix only" releases ? What is the problem if we
would have glibc 2.1.14 ? It is stupid to know the bug was fixed
3 month ago, but is not released yet. The distributors start adding
patches, and nobody really know the version which is used.

And maybe it is necessary to maintain 3 branches:
1. the current "bug-fix" version
2. the next bigger release with new, smaller features
   like support for new kernel functions.
3. the version with big changes like locale support.

We have the current situation, because small, new features
go into the "bug-fix" branch, since nobody will wait 2 years
until the next major release is made. glibc 2.2 was scheduled
to come 6 month after glibc 2.1, but this was for a much longer
time then 6 month.

  Thorsten  

-- 
Thorsten Kukuk       http://www.suse.de/~kukuk/       kukuk@suse.de
SuSE GmbH            Schanzaeckerstr. 10            90443 Nuernberg
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