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Upstream "stable" branches and Debian freeze



Hi,

I'm the upstream maintainer of the Music Player Daemon project, and
receive a number of support requests / bug reports from Debian users
who use the outdated version 0.15.12 of "mpd", currently in testing.
These bugs were already fixed in newer maintenance releases.

I know that Debian does not upgrade upstream versions at this point.
However, I would like to know if upgrading within an upstream "stable"
branch like MPD's v0.15.x would be acceptable.

It seems common practice to cherry-pick upstream patches, and apply
them to the old Debian package.  That however seems like a waste of
time, since all commits in our stable branch are bug fixes which would
need to be picked, and in the end, you would essentially have version
0.15.15 which prints "0.15.12" on --version, just to fulfill Debian's
policy.

For me personally, this boils down to the question: shall I continue
to maintain the old branch v0.15.x?  (there is also v0.16.x which is
also in maintenance mode)

If Debian picks up my maintenance releases, then it's worth it to keep
on maintaining the branch, to ensure that Debian users get the most
stable MPD version.  If not, I'll drop the branch, and fix bugs only
on v0.16.x.

Regards,
Max Kellermann

(Please keep me on Cc, I'm not subscribed)


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