Re: Announcement: "stable" branches for multipath-tools

[Benjamin Marzinski <bmarzins@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2025 at 03:56:30PM +0200, Martin Wilck wrote:
> On Sat, 2025-04-26 at 14:08 +0200, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
> > On 2/10/25 10:25 PM, Martin Wilck wrote:
> > 
> > > the multipath-tools maintainers have decided to start providing
> > > stable
> > > branches that accumulate bug fix patches only. We currently provide
> > > two
> > > branches, stable-0.10.y [1] and stable-0.11.y [2].
> > > 
> > > The stable branches are meant as a guideline for distribution
> > > maintainers to pick bug fixes without major regression risk. Only
> > > small
> > > patches that fix actual problems are eligible for inclusion in the
> > > stable trees.
> > 
> > hwtable patches (
> > https://github.com/opensvc/multipath-tools/commits/master/libmultipath/hwtable.c
> >  )
> > could be backported, as they are low risk.
> 
> Yes, but they aren't actual, bug fixes, either, and they change default
> behavior, which I'd prefer to avoid in the stable branches.
> 
> Ben, what's your take?

I think you're right. Even if we're just adding a new built-in config,
that could change how someone's multipath setup is configured, and while
the defaults are the recommeneded way to configure the device, it still
makes sense to not change them in what would otherwise be just a bugfix
branch, which is designed to safe to pull into a distribution at any
time.

On the other hand, if there are cases where an existing built-in config
is actually broken for a device, it would make sense to pull those fixes
into the stable branch.

-Ben

> 
> Martin