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Bug 3916

Summary: proposal for bug-fix-only stable branches
Product: SDL Reporter: programmerjake
Component: *don't know*Assignee: Ryan C. Gordon <icculus>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Sam Lantinga <slouken>
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: programmerjake
Version: HG 2.0   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   

Description programmerjake 2017-10-24 09:44:40 UTC 
I think it would be useful to release bug-fix-only stable branches for one or more versions of SDL and/or related libraries because, currently, each new release adds (sometimes extensive) new features and inadvertantly adds more bugs.
This would also provide a mechanism to easily release critical security bug fixes without having to wait for the development branch to become stable enough to release.
I think this could be implemented by somehow providing a simple mechanism for bug-fix commits to be proposed for addition to the stable branches while allowing for possible changes required for back-porting the fix.

for versioning, I think we could use something like 2.0.6.1 or 2.0.6-1 as the version number for the first bug-fix release based on 2.0.6.

Alternatively we could the versioning system described in SDL_version.h and start incrementing the minor version for backwards compatible changes, instead of how the patch number has been incrementing even though there have been some non-trivial additions (new audio resampling system, vulkan support, etc.). Then, when a non-backwards-compatible change is made, we'd switch the version to 3.0 instead of 2.1. To facilitate this, what would have been named 2.0.8 will be called 2.1.0 or 2.1.1 instead. I think it would be better to leave the already released versions with their original version numbers to reduce confusion.