[Bug build/34484] [gdb/build] Release support window

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=34484

--- Comment #1 from Simon Marchi <simark at simark dot ca> ---
What I think is not ideal for downstream maintainers (but I don't really know,
I am not one) is that between the N.2 release (the last and only bugfix
release, generally, of a branch) and the (N+1).1 release (the following "major"
release), there is a window of time where some bugs, possibly regressions
introduced in the N.1 release, get fixed, but are not part of any official
release.  In ideal circumstances  this windows is about 3 months, but can be
more if the new release encounters problems.

One way to fix this is to keep doing more bugfix releases of branch N (N.3,
N.4, etc) at regular intervals (montly?), as needed, until version N+1 is
released.  This way, a downstream consumer would not have to wait too long
(e.g. max a month) to get a version of GDB with the fixes to the regressions
that version N introduced.  That means more work for release managers, but
perhaps not too bad if the process is very streamlined.

Carlos' suggestion, if I understand it correctly, would mean not doing bugfix
releases at all.  The process would be something like:

 - create gdb-N-branch branch
 - wait a bit for people to test and things to stabilize
 - once we are satifisfied with the state of the branch, declare (and tag) that
the current tip of the branch is the initial official release of that branch
 - any subsequent commit to that branch is a release of its own, that we claim
can be 
 confidently picked up by downstream

What I'm not sure is what do they do for tarball releases. Do you publish an
tarball for the initial release of the branch, but then any updates to that
branch have to be picked up from git?

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