docs: mention maintenance branches

Mitre tried to assign us two separate CVEs for the fix for
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1047577, on the
grounds that the fixes were separated by more than an hour
and thus triggered different hourly snapshots.  But we
explicitly do NOT want to treat transient security bugs as
CVEs if they can only be triggered by patches in libvirt.git
but where the problem is cleaned up before a formal release.

Meanwhile, I noticed that while our wiki mentioned maintenance
branches and releases, our formal documentation did not.

* docs/downloads.html.in: Contrast hourly snapshots with
maintenance branches.

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
This commit is contained in:
Eric Blake 2014-01-14 09:49:50 -07:00
parent e8eb8d8497
commit 908903b317

View File

@ -22,7 +22,9 @@
<p>
Once an hour, an automated snapshot is made from the git server
source tree. These snapshots should be usable, but we make no guarantees
about their stability:
about their stability; furthermore, they should NOT be
considered formal releases, and they may have transient security
problems that will not be assigned a CVE.
</p>
<ul>
@ -30,6 +32,28 @@
<li><a href="http://libvirt.org/sources/libvirt-git-snapshot.tar.gz">libvirt.org HTTP server</a></li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="maintenance">Maintenance releases</a></h2>
<p>
In the git repository are several stable maintenance branches,
matching the
pattern <code>v<i>major</i>.<i>minor</i>.<i>micro</i>-maint</code>;
these branches are forked off the corresponding
<code>v<i>major</i>.<i>minor</i>.<i>micro</i></code> formal
release, and may have further releases of the
form <code>v<i>major</i>.<i>minor</i>.<i>micro</i>.<i>rel</i></code>.
These maintenance branches should only contain bug fixes, and no
new features, backported from the master branch, and are
supported as long as at least one downstream distribution
expresses interest in a given branch. These maintenance
branches are considered during CVE analysis.
</p>
<p>
For more details about contents of maintenance releases, see
<a href="http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Maintenance_Releases">the
wiki page</a>.
</p>
<h2><a name="git">GIT source repository</a></h2>
<p>