rocklinux/Documentation/Developers/STABLE-TREE

Policy for Stable Tree Maintainance
===================================

The Stable Tree Project has three defined goals:

	1. Fixing bugs and security issues

	2. Updating packages to newer versions

	3. Creation of reference build binaries

The set of changes in the stable tree should be kept to an absolute minimum.

There is one single maintainer for the ROCK Linux Stable tree. Nobody else
may write to the source tree, but everybody is free to send patches to the
maintainer.

1. Fixing bugs and security issues
----------------------------------

Whenever there is a security problem reported, the required updates or
bug-fixes should be performed in the stable tree and an advisory should be
send to the mailing list.

Bugfixes should be applied unless fixing the bug would introduce more new
troubles than it solves (e.g. requires redesignes of core build scripts). In
this case, it should be considered to drop the feature or marking it as
broken instead of fixing it.


2. Updating packages to newer versions
--------------------------------------

Package updates should be performed unless the newer version of a package
introduces new problems or breaks compatibility with the old package and so
would require rebuilding a large part of the system.


3. Creation of reference build binaries
---------------------------------------

The stable tree maintainer is responsible for creating and distributing
ISOs of an un-optimized x86 reference build and also creates and distributes
update gem packages for updated packages. That includes maintaining an
ftp or http archive with the ISO images and the GEM package files.


A. Release and Sourcecode Management
------------------------------------

The source-code must be available via an open-source versioning-system like
cvs or subversion and via ftp or http.

Major releases should be done after important security of bug-fixes.