I disagree with the final statement of this, that a "security only" release would have somehow helped the situation. I feel like part of the problem is that things are being merged into 3-2-stable and nobody is using them because they're never put into a release.
3.2.11 and 3.2.12 were both security-only releases, and so fixes and patches that were not security-related have just been piling up for the longest time.
Seems like a "release often" mindset might be better and might ensure that things are actually being used. Sure, I know someone is going to blast me saying that bugs like this shouldn't make it into 3-2-stable at all, and since this is Hacker News so whoever says that knows they're ten times the developer that everyone on the Rails core team is. But the reality is that bugs make it into stable branches, and almost nobody is running against the stable branch (Rails core people are probably mostly running against the 4.0 branch, everyone else is running against the latest release).
Actually 3.2.12 also added some sort of silly (and broken) patch related to quoting numeric values in ActiveRecord. The primary thing I want out of 3.2.13 is reverting this.
To your more general point, while I don't disagree with your diagnosis of things piling up in stable, I'm also not a big fan of your proposed solution. It looks to me like 3-2-stable is getting filled with a lot of stuff that just should not there; increasing the release frequency is not going to solve this problem.
Comments
I disagree with the final statement of this, that a "security only" release would have somehow helped the situation. I feel like part of the problem is that things are being merged into 3-2-stable and nobody is using them because they're never put into a release.
3.2.11 and 3.2.12 were both security-only releases, and so fixes and patches that were not security-related have just been piling up for the longest time.
Seems like a "release often" mindset might be better and might ensure that things are actually being used. Sure, I know someone is going to blast me saying that bugs like this shouldn't make it into 3-2-stable at all, and since this is Hacker News so whoever says that knows they're ten times the developer that everyone on the Rails core team is. But the reality is that bugs make it into stable branches, and almost nobody is running against the stable branch (Rails core people are probably mostly running against the 4.0 branch, everyone else is running against the latest release).
Actually 3.2.12 also added some sort of silly (and broken) patch related to quoting numeric values in ActiveRecord. The primary thing I want out of 3.2.13 is reverting this.
To your more general point, while I don't disagree with your diagnosis of things piling up in stable, I'm also not a big fan of your proposed solution. It looks to me like 3-2-stable is getting filled with a lot of stuff that just should not there; increasing the release frequency is not going to solve this problem.