[vbox-dev] VirtualBox LTS (was: "The number of bug reports with virtualbox loaded are truly astonishing")

[Alexey Eromenko]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Arend Dittmer <admin at mypocketxp.com> wrote:
> Agree. Ranting is pointless.
>
> What surprises me though is the relatively high number of regressions that
> keep popping up. A simple search on the latest changelog for 4.0.18 yields
> 23 hits from 4.0.18 back to 4.0.

...This is simple Watson. There is no 4.0.18. There are 4.0.16 and
4.1.8. :) ... so searching for 4.0.18 on Google is like searching for
aliens...
========
A bit more serious note:

As for regressions, they do pop-up. (4.1.2 broken guest exec, 4.1.4
broken RHEL4 goodies, 4.1.8 broken symlink in vbox SF, ...)

One idea is to maintain a community-led VirtualBox LTS (Long-Term
Support edition; It must be done together with the Debian project,
which has the need for a 3-year support).
One big obstacle is that the public SVN tree of "stable" series does
not exist, and the individual patches are obfuscated. (similar to
RHEL6 kernel tree)

Why is this a problem ?

Out of curiosity, I have made a diff between 4.1.6 and 4.1.8 official
source tarballs, and the result was 1.3 MB patch ! yay !
Also I consider this amount of change inappropriate for a point release.

Needless to say that maintaining a community 'LTS' version becomes
very difficult
under those circumstances, due to impossibility to backport patches
from Oracle's stable tree.
Anyway: if the community is big enough, then the 'LTS' might be
possible anyway, without Oracle's babysitting.

If Oracle wants to help: I'd be glad to see a public SVN tree for
Stable series. (4.1.x)

> My understanding of regressions is that they are bug fixes that 'dropped
> out' over time reintroducing the original problem. I am curious to
> understand why this happens relatively often.

"regression" is when a new release breaks functionality, that worked
in a previous release. (either major release: 4.1.x vs. 4.0.x or a
point release: 4.1.x vs. 4.1.y)

-- 
-Alexey Eromenko "Technologov"