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Re: gnustep release numbers


From: Hubert Chan
Subject: Re: gnustep release numbers
Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 18:30:09 -0400
User-agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/22.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Richard Frith-Macdonald said:

> There is a tension between those who ask for more frequent releases
> (because they want new features) and those who ask for less frequent
> releases because they have some issue with keeping multiple releases
> on disk

I would prefer to have more frequent releases, but with a stable
SONAME/ABI.

> (you never need to recompile programs for a new release if you keep
> the old libraries ... that's what library versioning is for).

Actually, with the recent GNUstep 0.11.0/1.13.0 release, you are unable
to run programs compiled against 0.10.3/1.12.0 because the old library
could not communicate with ... I think it was gdnc (I assume due to a
change in the communication protocol).

On the other hand, if you take a program compiled against 0.10.3/1.12.0
and make libgnustep-base.so.1.12.0 a symlink to
libgnustep-base.so.1.13.0, and libgnustep-gui.so.0.10.3 a symlink to
libgnustep-gui.so.0.11.0, it seems to run perfectly fine.  I just tried
it on my system, with a few different programs, and they all ran fine,
which suggests that we didn't need an SONAME bump.

AFACT, the general rule that most other library developers follow is
that if you add things to your libraary, you don't need to bump the
SONAME.  You only bump the SONAME if you remove things, or do other
changes that remove library symbols (such as replace a function with a
#define macro).  So AFAICT, we don't really need to bump the SONAME for
GNUstep at every release.

> I think we are trying to make more frequent releases than we used to
> ... eg once every six months, because (unscientific estimate) there
> seem to be more complaints about there being too few releases than
> about there being too many.

> Actually, my sympathy with either complaint is limited ...  People who
> complain about too few releases always have the option of using SVN
> trunk or snapshots with very little extra work required.

Well, for the Debian packages, I'm a bit wary of packaging SVN
snapshots, unless there's a very good reason for doing so.

> People who complain about too many releases can always keep multiple
> releases on their system or simply skip releases now and then, only
> upgrading with bugfix releases for the main release they are using.

Again, with my Debian packaging hat on (it would probably be less
important to me just as a regular user), we're only supposed to have one
version of each library in Debian, unless there's a very good reason for
having multiple versions.  So every time the SONAME is bumped, we need
to recompile every GNUstep program, and every program has to be compiled
before the new library can enter the testing distribution.

> And as long as the complaints from both groups are roughly equal,
> we've probably got the actual release rate about right.

-- 
Hubert Chan - email & Jabber: address@hidden - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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