Re: [Chicken-hackers] CR #1142 and upcoming changes

[Peter Bex]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 01:27:58PM +0100, Andy Bennett wrote:
> It may even be possible to do some parts of the work, such as splitting
> srfis out of core, in 4.X as these will not require .scm sourcecode
> changes; only metadata changes.

I'm not sure about this.  We could do that while 5.0 is being hacked on,
but it would (needlessly) break all the unmaintained eggs.  Some of
those eggs might still be useful, even if they're unmaintained.
Of course people could pick up development or push one-off fixes for
all the useful ones, but it seems like needless breakage if we're going
to go with other breaking changes for CHICKEN 5 anyway.

> Would the intention be to move all primary development effort over to
> the 5 branch? How would 4.9 stability releases work? Most of the
> proposed 5 work is cleanup. Where would feature work be expected to be
> done? What work would be done before the first stable 5 release and what
> work would come in point releases after that?

We don't have the manpower to maintain two active branches.  Stability
releases will still be made for important bugfixes on 4.9, as usual, at
least until 5.0 is out.  Possibly for some time following that, if it
turns out that too many people are stuck on 4.9.

Cheers,
Peter
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