At some point in the future we can reevaluate that. If we change over to CMake someday, perhaps testing will become so easy that a lot of resources are freed. Or maybe as we refine the quarterly release cycle, quarterly releases will become so automatic that we can divert resources to point releases occasionally. But not now.
That's fine with me, as long as we all understand that the new system where there is a single "release" branch does not accomodate point releases. Should we decide to start making point releases, we'll have to change the system again.
Anyway, maybe being able to tell people straight out that Boost doesn't do point releases will help explain things to the many people who have been asking how the current system can work.
Note that if any library author want's to do a "point release" all he has to do is to gather up the files and directories which are changed into a zip file and post them somewhere for interested parties. Or, he could create his own branch of the "1.36" tag and label it "1.36.1 - serialization hot fix" (so as not to get intertwined with hot fixes/point releases for other libraries). The current system in no way prohibits or discourages this. I did this for serialization 1.36 version (the zip file method) 5 months before the official boost 1.36 version was released to address the issue of DLLS and multi-threading in the serialization which some users felt was important to them. Seemed to work out for all concerned and didn't place any burden on the boost release manager or process. Robert Ramey