On Saturday 30 September 2017 05:27 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
I'm a little underslept and I'm not sure I fully understand the issue
here, but would it help if we literally just tagged point releases and
pushed tarballs to ftp.gnu.org from a cron job? Once a month if there
have been any patches since the previous tag, perhaps? With the
official line being that all patches on the release branches are
carefully vetted and we recommend tracking the git branch if you can,
but this is easier for some downstream organizations so we offer this
as well.
That is probably a waste of resources and also not entirely secure since
it would preclude signing packages.
As a past Fedora maintainer, the feedback I got from a number of package
maintainers and testers in the Fedora community was that it was easier
to bisect bad patches when they were backported piece by piece as
opposed to looking at two tarballs, getting their tags, downloading
upstream sources, making scratch packages for them and then running
tests on them. Given that Debian/Ubuntu follows a similar structure, I
suppose they would have similar problems.