Re: public releases

[Peter Simons]

Guido Draheim writes:

 > [Public releases are] actually a form of communication to
 > maintainers of local copies (i.e. "administrators") that now is a
 > good time to sync the official part of the autoconf extension
 > repository.

How often should we "release"? By what criteria? I can think of the
following options:

 (1) We release every time a new macro has been accepted into the
     archive.

 (1a) If we have several candidates pending that look good, we might
     delay the release a couple of days to include all of them in a
     batch.)

 (2) We release in time intervals. (Weekly? Biweekly? Monthly?)

 (3) We release whenever we want to.


 > [Release version numbers need only be incremental] to fullfil the
 > need of the usual package formats.

Should we provide version numbers at all? Or wouldn't it be better to
date-stamp the releases as in:

    autoconf-archive-2003-01.tar.gz   (January 2003)
    autoconf-archive-2003-02.tar.gz   (February 2003)
    [...]

Plus:

    autoconf-archive-current.tar.gz

Which is updated immediately when the archive changes in any way.

If we want to provide conventional version-number-ing, what policy do
we use as when to increment the major version number and as when to
increment the minor version number?

Thinking freely, the following possibilities come to my mind:

 (1) Increase the major version every time the structure changes.
     (Like categories being added.) If else, increase the minor version
     number.

     This means that we could end up distributing an archive having
     the version "1.1239024". :-)


 (2) Increase the major version every time a new macro is added or an
     obsolete expires. Increase the minor version for cosmetic
     changes. (Fixing typos in the documentation, etc.)

     This means that we could end up distributing an archive having
     the version "1239024.1". :-)

Peter