Re: GNU make: Next release schedule.

[Boris Kolpackov]

Hi Paul,

Paul D. Smith <address@hidden> writes:

> I'm announcing a schedule for the next release of GNU make, version
> 3.82.  I plan to kick off the release cycle by creating GNU make 3.81.91
> (3.82 rc1) on Oct 1.

Ouch, that's soon ;-). I really need to implement fixes for the
following two things:

1. Silent failure bug (12686, 15110, 25493, 17740 I believe are 
   all describing the same bug). I already tried to fix this 
   before 3.81 but the changes were too extensive.

2. Change "the first pattern" search algorithm to "the most specific 
   pattern" for pattern rules and pattern-specific variables.
   
   This way when we have:

   /tmp/%.o: /tmp/%.c
        ...

   /tmp/foo/%.o: /tmp/foo/%.c
        ...

   all: /tmp/foo/a.o

   The second (more specific) rule will be used instead of the
   first one (which is what happens right now).

   I remember we discussed this some time ago and the consensus
   was that it is generally a good idea.

I would also like to look into bugs #25780 (".SECONDEXPANSION: of $$+ 
harmed by set_file_variables() side effect") and #24140 ("Pattern-
specific variable assignment behaves differently compared to normal 
variables"). Plus check for any performance degradations on my build
system.

I will try my best to meet the 1 Oct deadline thought it is a tall 
order to try to find time to work on all this in 13 days. Can we maybe
extend it to Oct 15?


> I'll create a release tarball and announce it in the usual places, 
> and give until Oct 15 for people to test it out. 

I think this is too little time. Our best bet in uncovering serious bugs
are distributions like Debian, Fedora, etc. For them to package and
upload make and then re-build a significant portion of the repository
in 15 days is unrealistic (i.e., there won't be many new versions of
the packages in this time frame that would trigger rebuilds). I would
say a couple of months would be a good bet. After all, we have already
waited a couple of years ;-). 


> After the release, I'll be converting the GNU make CVS archive over to
> git.

I am all for it.


> I'll also be instituting regular, time-based releases. Probably every 6
> months but maybe more often if activity warrants it. 

I may be in the minority here but I believe for a critical tool like
GNU make releasing very often is not going to bring much benefit. I
would say 1 year cycle (10 months development and 2 months beta testing)
for the "new features" releases sounds good. We can make bug-fix-only
releases as required.

Boris