[Qgis-psc] A plea for backporting

[Martin Dobias]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Tim Sutton <tim at linfiniti.com> wrote:
>
> Although it doesn't sometimes seem like it, this is something we would
> love to do. The wiki pages you point to demonstrate I have also put a
> lot of thought into how to create more stablised QGIS versions. I know
> we are 8 years old, but in many respects we are still an immature
> project, with much work and activity taking place in implementing
> basic GIS features still. I don't believe there are any of us that are
> able to work full time on QGIS and we have to deal with economy of
> effort and herding cats (i.e. the effect that developers will work on
> what they want to work on, not what we ask them to work on). Until we
> can figure out how to attract someone to maintain backports / stable
> releases, I'm afraid that even with the best will in the world this
> simply isnt going to happen. Later this year we are hoping to put out
> QGIS 2.0 and we can try again to maintain that as a stable release. I
> think using GIT will make this easier as we should be able to cherry
> pick & merge upstream commits.

Just to add, we have tried to backport fixes from 1.x releases back to
stable 1.0.x branches. But given the pace of the development, the
backporting started to be challenging soon since the codebase changed
a lot. For a comparison, there have been about 5K commits from release
of v1.0 until now, while there were about 10K commits from zero to
v1.0 release.

Regards
Martin