Re: DELAYED: GDB 6.7 branch creation scheduled June 25th

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker at adacore dot com>]

> It's just the one that I left in the the message "So where's the gain in
> branching early?" but perhaps Stan Shebs answered it.

And again, why are you saying that we're branching early? I think
I understand the real question now that you've mentioned the annotation
bug again. Otherwise, the answer would be the same: We're not branching
early, we have lots of exciting stuff that could benefit a lot of users.
We should release that, and I think the sooner the better.

Note that the time of branching is only loosely related to the time
when we make the release. The branch is only a tool that we have to
help us stabilize a code base. So just because we branch next week
doesn't mean that we can't take the time we need to create the actual
release.

> You're the release manager so presumably you can insist on certain things
> being done before a release is made.

What I can do is delay the release. You know however that I cannot force
anyone to do anything, much less within a certain time-frame.

> It breaks existing use of Gdb in Emacs 22.1.

OK, I missed that part. This is indeed more serious than I thought.

> My plan would be just revert the change and I think Jan Kratochvil has
> agreed with this.  AFAICS there's no reason why this would delay the
> release.

Sounds like a promising plan. But you are hammering at the wrong guy.
Keep pinging Jan and the maintainers that can approve the revert,
not me.

> It's not just a bug but a regression.  I don't think breaking a feature
> and then documenting it as a known problem is really an acceptable policy.

It's usually not acceptable, as you know, but sometimes we can
compromise. It depends on the situation and the severity of the
regression.

-- 
Joel