Comment 21 for bug 1595358

Thank you for taking the time to review the issue. I'll try to ask some information from an upstream point of view. Also, your remarks are interesting wrt our policy of creating the final stable release.

I will start by the end: all our stable releases 2.x.y with y>0 are a form of this cherry picking. We have a stable release manager who vets such backporting on a case-by-case basis. We do not have comprehensive regression tests for all these changes because (1) we are a small team and (2) it is more difficult with a GUI.

Since I am on the issue of tests, what we have now is
* a few unit tests
* a reasonable set of tests for tex2lyx (importation from LaTeX)
* a reasonable set of tests of all possible export cases, although in this case we mostly check that the exported LaTeX actually compiles. We do catch bugs with it, though.
* we routinely run coverity scan on master branch and backport meaningful fixes, and have a policy of having no compile warnings with -Wall -Wextra.

I understand that this is not professional-level quality insurance, but at least we do try :)

The two big chunks of interest are:
* boost
  - update included boost to 1.60: this is typically not used in a ubuntu build, which uses system
    library
  - updates to compile with boost 1.60: this is needed in general since we want LyX to be compilable on
    more modern distributions.
  I understand that these changes are not necessary for xenial.
* lyx2lyx: I am not sure what to think about that. I used to think that this was definitely the way to
  do it, but now I see your point about the amount of changes. All I can say is that reading old files,
  along with not losing work on a crash, are two things we are very careful with. This is what it takes
  to have users who trust us. Note that, thanks to lyx2lyx, LyX is still able to read and typeset files
  from the 0.7 era (1995).

I completely see your point about manual cherry-picking. However, we do not have people doing that for each distribution. What I think is that the work the we do at a global level with these stable distributions is the best we can do given our lack of manpower. We try to maintain a real difference between what goes into stable releases vs master branch.

What we want to setup soon is a service of nightly builds for at least ubuntu so that at a few users get a chance to catch bugs earlier.

I will end with another argument towards your proto-decison of rejecting the update: we do provide a ppa (lyx-devel) which provides recent lyx builds for older distributions, under our responsibility. This is not totally upd to date these days, as I have to take it over and I do not understand anything about launchpad :)