[Freeswitch-users] 1.0.4 vs. trunk vs. bugs

[Jason White]

Lon Baker <lon at kickasspixels.com> wrote:
 
> I'm looking down the road. As the project grows and FS becomes a critical
> piece of any company's infrastructure a clear distinction between "stable"
> and "development" branches are pretty standard in project the scope of FS.

I would rather that the developers spend time fixing bugs and implementing new
features instead of backporting changes to a "stable" branch that may be very
outdated.

One way of managing this is the Linux kernel's model, with short
development/release cycles, where there is only one branch. (There are
short-lived "stable" branches as in 2.6.32.1, 2.6.32.2 etc., but my
understanding is that bug fixes destined for those branches must already have
been applied to the development branch destined for the next release; this
minimizes back-porting of fixes.)

I'm sure there are other models. My essential point is that, so far, the
FreeSWITCH developers have not chosen to maintain long-lived "stable"
branches, that there are alternatives to this approach, and that it has its
downside, especially regarding the extra time/effort/work associated with
maintaining it.