[dpdk-dev] On DPDK ABI policy

[Matthew Hall]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 02:51:35PM +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> LTS releases could help the situation somewhat, but then again
> people tend to still want those new fancy things backported (you
> know, have the cake and eat it too) but that can't be done because
> of ABI breakage, so they're forced to run the latest version anyway.

RH and Debian / Ubuntu don't put features in LTS except extremely rarely. 
Generally only if there's severe functionality breakage or security issues and 
the rest is ignored, and for good reason, as this is much more reliable and 
simple and predictable.

If people are so irrational they can't deal with that simple of a policy, 
NEXT_ABI, LTS, etc. is never going to help them.

If people like to have backported stuff, yes of course we can make trees and 
branches for this, they are basically free in Git. But at that point community 
people in need of LTS forks of features need to step up to the plate to help 
out.

Matthew.