Seeing that some distros seem to have botched their own backporting of gitk patches to maintenance tracks that are older than what we would support, I am wondering if we can do something to help them, without bending over backwards beyond reasonable effort that should be expected of us. The latest security fixes went to 8 maintenance tracks but I suspect it is probably 5 or 6 too many. Here is an idea. What would happen if we stop tagging any releases, and instead change the "release" model to tag the commit that happens to be at the tip of "master" once a month, strictly based on time (so after Git 2.50.0, we would have Git 2.50.202508 and then the next one would be Git 2.50.202509, if we decided to do this once every month)? If we "release" reasonably often enough to make the distinction between the tags so smooth and meaningless, would it help in weaning the distros off of their mentality that pick one "major" version and stick to that version unless the user upgrades the Operating System version as a whole? After all, we do not make changes that are backward-incompatible at the end-user level, and the "we stick to a given single major released version to give stability to our users" mantra that leads distros to ship and support an ancient version is hurting them (and their users) more than helping.
