On 4/16/14 3:42 AM, Bálint Réczey wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Many of you probably know about the Wireshark package [1] in Debian
> which I started maintaining a few years ago. Like every other package
> in Debian, the version of Wireshark included in the major distribution
> release is getting security and stability updates through the lifetime
> [2] of the major distribution release which is typically 3 years, but
> it is still shorter than the lifetime of an Ubuntu LTS (5 years) or
> Red Hat [3] (10 years).
>
> Wireshark, the Project, makes a major release every year and according
> our current policy we support [4] the current and previous release
> which makes Wireshark releases lifetime 2 years.
>
> Wireshark makes point releases after each major release fixing bugs
> adding minor features and improvements, but only the security and some
> stability related fixes get included in updates to the Debian package.
> Since the Debian packages have longer lifetime than Wireshark release
> I back-port security related fixes to older releases than the project
> which means that I already maintain two Wireshark branches with
> security fixes only in the form of patch sets [5]. Other distribution
> maintainers do the same.
>
> Since we moved to Git maintaining the branches became easier and I
> would like to as the project to allow me to maintain the two existing
> branches in the projects repository. Going forward I would like to
> open one similar branch for at least every Debian major release and
> maintain at least through the major release's lifetime.
>
> I think it would not create any significant additional work for the
> community but it would provide many advantages.
>
> 1. We could provide an upgrade path for people focused only on
> security but not on other improvements keeping the existing release
> plan.
> 2. Distribution maintainers could eliminate the duplicate work by
> collaborating in the LTS branches.
> 3. Back-ported fixes could get better testing using the existing
> buildbot infrastructure.
> 4. Back-ported fixes could be reviewed by more people.
>
> One additional note regarding Debian, we (at Debian) are thinking
> about extending the lifespan of each release to 5 years [7] and this
> would extend my commitment to maintaining the Wireshark LTS branches
> naturally.
>
> Would the Project be open for the proposed branches?
Overall it sounds fine to me. How many branches would be created and how
would they be named?
