3 ms·

If it works fine, why would you need a “bugfix fork”?

• kazinator 5y ago
  There has to be a fork so that the software being used is identified by a formal tag pointing at a specific commit, and this is backed by some sort of project commitment to put out a commit, if necessary. It works fine in that I'm not running into issues and not missing features, not in the sense that I proved that it's free of defects; I don't require a fork that has any new commits. Surely, bugs have been found between that version and now, some of which can be meaningfully backported. Programs can break simply because of all the other moving parts in the environments that are out there; it's a fact of life nowadays that software needs to have a maintenance plan to be viable. A compiler, library or kernel upgrade can expose some latent problem in a program.