Talk Of Doing Point Releases For LLVM

Tom Stellard of AMD, the developer that has been working on open-source OpenCL support, has proposed to the upstream LLVM development community that they begin doing point releases.

In order to push out bug-fixes sooner and possible minor feature enhancements, Tom Stellard proposed doing point releases, e.g. LLVM 3.3.1, 3.3.2, etc. As it stands now, there is basically just one major LLVM release every six months or so but no point releases to carry over changes in that interim period. With Stellard maintaining the R600 GPU back-end in LLVM, he's wanting to push out changes in released form sooner. Stellard also says he would be willing to serve as an LLVM update release manager.

His mailing list proposal received a fair amount of feedback, mostly positive, but some logistics remain to be figured. There's some concern whether LLVM point releases should introduce new features/functionality or strictly be bug-fixes, who are the users of these point releases, whether there are enough resources to handle doing point releases, who decides what should go into a point release, etc.

While it was mostly positive feedback in support of the point release concept, the discussion has quieted down in the past few days. Hopefully though we will end up seeing point releases going forward. The next planned release is LLVM 3.3 and it's expected in June.