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Re: gnustep release numbers


From: Helge Hess
Subject: Re: gnustep release numbers
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 00:50:41 +0200

Richard,

you outline the scenario as an either/or (more frequent vs less frequent) while IMHO its quite the contrary. The current situation suits neither of the "camps", for most its too slow, for some its (by far) too fast. I don't think there is anyone who wants an "almost stable" version. I think my proposal suits _both_ camps much better. It allows for more frequent alpha releases while at the same time allowing for a stable release.

Why? Currently you have a mixed situation where you even make bugfix releases for unstable releases (1.10.1, 1.10.2 etc). In my scenario you have one version where you don't need to care at all about backwards compatibility and just *one* which you keep ABI stable.

Your suggestion that one can just "stop" updating is really incomprehensible. By this you suggest that everyone who wants to use GNUstep libraries in broader deployments needs to maintain his own stable branch (and pkgs for distris). Well, at least for us thats (much) more work than just staying with libFoundation. And it wouldn't really be GNUstep anymore anyway but a fork. I think I can safely assume thats exactly the same for other people (if there are any ;-) who actually want to use GNUstep in a setting with out-of-the- house deployments.

We recently upgraded libFoundation from 1.0 to 1.1 which in fact was a major migration (and amount of confusion) for users (which 95% use binary packages). Notably we did this in our unstable branch (OGo 1.1). I guess that the users which use the ages old but rock solid OGo 1.0 and the ones which use OGo 1.1 is about 50/50. Even the latter complain with 1.0=>1.1 changes ;-)


Anyway, don't mind ;-) IMHO we can stop the thread now, the proposal doesn't matter for people who really use GNUstep now. So it won't change. As always.

Greets,
  Helge

PS: "So GNUstep releases are now 'stable' because each release starts a branch in svn where bugfixes can be applied ... this is a purely academic distinction". Of course this is nonsense. A branch itself doesn't make a version stable, but a branch can be marked as a stable branch (eg by an even version number ;-). Declaring something "stable" is a commitment/discipline not to change the ABI of that branch in the next n months, nothing technically enforced (well, real projects have release managers ;-)



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