(and make flash as well)

This also slipped into the 2019.10 release 😳
Will there be a bugfix release before 2020.01?

That's up to @kb2ma. Will there be a 2019.10.1 release (also potentially with other bug fixes)?

I don't recall a guideline on the topic of point releases, so I'll review past instances for some context. Certainly this fix is worth of a backport so that a user at least could use a fresh checkout of the '2019.10-branch' branch, so please do that and I would be happy to merge it.

Ahhh, release management -- the gift that keeps on giving. ;-)

Hm, how should I interpret the output of

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "dist/tools/backport_pr/backport_pr.py", line 19, in <module>
    from agithub.GitHub import GitHub
  File "/home/benpicco/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/agithub/__init__.py", line 3, in <module>
    from agithub.base import VERSION
  File "/home/benpicco/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/agithub/base.py", line 18, in <module>
    VERSION = get_version(root='..', relative_to=__file__)
  File "/home/benpicco/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/setuptools_scm/__init__.py", line 150, in get_version
    parsed_version = _do_parse(config)
  File "/home/benpicco/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/setuptools_scm/__init__.py", line 113, in _do_parse
    "use git+https://github.com/user/proj.git#egg=proj" % config.absolute_root
LookupError: setuptools-scm was unable to detect version for '/home/benpicco/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages'.

Make sure you're either building from a fully intact git repository or PyPI tarballs. Most other sources (such as GitHub's tarballs, a git checkout without the .git folder) don't contain the necessary metadata and will not work.

For example, if you're using pip, instead of https://github.com/user/proj/archive/master.zip use git+https://github.com/user/proj.git#egg=proj

I just did pip3 install agithub because that package was missing.

@benpicco what is the context?

I don't recall a guideline on the topic of point releases, so I'll review past instances for some context. Certainly this fix is worth of a backport so that a user at least could use a fresh checkout of the '2019.10-branch' branch, so please do that and I would be happy to merge it.

There were instances of bug-fixing releases in the past see e.g. 2018.10.1 (and it was also discussed for 2019.04, IIRC, maybe @MrKevinWeiss give more info on that). I think all in all it's up to the severity of the bug and if the release manager sees their job done after the major release or not (there were release managers in the past that specifically opted out to not have bug fix releases).

@miri64 oh sorry, that was the backport_pr.py script.

Thanks for the retrospective, @miri64. Yes, I saw 2018.10.1, which looks to have been triggered by a serious security issue, #10739.

If I understand correctly, the current issue includes all the sam*-xpro and arduino-zero boards. This is painful, but I don't think it rises to the need for a point release. I think the backport to 2019.10-branch is good enough. If someone doesn't want to mess with git, they can just download it from the GitHub interface.

I have added this topic to my release debrief for the upcoming assembly. Based on that, I plan to add a couple of sentences on this subject to the release guidelines for future reference.

Backport provided in #12685

Went ahead and created the backport to keep things moving.