New Spring policy: maintenance branch to the rescue?

I listened to Alef Arendsen in Stockholm today and he said that the problem for non-customers could be solved by using the maintenance branch.

If you checkout from the maintenance branch you can follow what issues have been fixed by cross referencing with the Jira issues. You will not get unfinished new features - only bug fixes for your release.

We won’t get the official, blessed release, after QA. We will have to trust SpringSource to keep the maintenance branch stable. And we will have to track issues so that our issues are fixed when we build.

On the other hand, the Territory Manager of SpringSource for Europe said that bug fixes might be committed in two batches. You have the risk of checking out in between.

I still have two worries:

* What is the quality of the maintenance branches? I haven’t looked at the Spring CVS for a long time. Will what Alef suggest work?

* Is this just the first step? As Alef said, SpringSource need more money, otherwise Spring will not exist anymore (!). What if this first tough message isn’t resulting in more customers and subscriptions?

What do you think?

Update: Looking at the Spring CVS, it doesn’t seem like they do a lot of maintenance branches? So how is this going to work?