On 2021-11-29 13:21:52 +0100 (+0100), Jean-Philippe Evrard wrote: [...]
My experience at SUSE was that the branching model is even debatable: It was more work, and after all, we were taking the code we wanted, and put our patches on top if those didn't make upstream/weren't backported on time for x reasons (valid or not ;)). So basically, for me, the stable branches have very little value nowdays from the community perspective (it would be good enough if everybody is fixing master, IMO). [...]
The primary reason stable branches exist is to make it easier for us to test and publish backports of critical patches to older versions of the software, rather than expecting our downstream consumers to do that work themselves. If you're saying distribution package maintainers are going to do it anyway and ignore our published backports, then dropping the branching model may make sense, but I've seen evidence to suggest that at least some distros do consume our backports directly. -- Jeremy Stanley