Reminder: master branch is frozen for non-documentary changes

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi folks,

Just a reminder that the master branch is supposed to be frozen for
non-documentary changes.  There have indeed been many commits to master
since 1.23.0.rc2, but they have become progressively restricted in
purpose--from bug fixes (roughly rc3), to build/portability fixes (up to
rc4), to documentation-only fixes (since rc4).

I've been in touch via private mail with Bertrand and he expects to tag
1.23.0 final in the next few days.  I will happily announce the
re-opening of master to general mayhem[1] after a brief interval to
convince ourselves that the final release isn't in fact a dud.  I dread
the sort of reviews Thomas Dickey gave to a series of Autoconf releases
about 20 years ago.[3]

There are several bug fixes I am eager to land, as noted earlier,[4] and
right now I am thinking a 1.23.1 release is more likely than not.  That
is compatible with general mayhem on master because what I propose to do
is create a 1.23.x branch and cherry-pick changes from master to that
branch, and tag the post-zero point releases on that branch.  During
that time I expect Bertrand and I to be proceeding with the FSF
paperwork to make me the GNU maintainer for groff.

What do y'all think of this plan?

Regards,
Branden

[1] That is, open to those exciting forms of mayhem that don't cause any
    automated tests to fail.[2]

[2] With the usual exception of proving the validity of a newly added
    regression test.

[3]

2.58 (2003-11-04) Administrative blunder.
2.57 (2002-12-03) Back up to beta quality! Within a few weeks a handful
                  of serious bugs were reported, making it less useful
                  than 2.52.
2.56 (2002-11-15) Fixes an administrative blunder.
2.55              Dead on arrival.
2.54 (2002-09-13) Do not use: it was not tested with other “make”
                  programs than GNU make.
2.53 (2002-03-18) Too many initial bug reports to bother with. Features
                  incomplete support for OS/2 EMX.
2.52 (2001-07-18) Moderately stable (beta quality).
2.51 (2001-07-17) Dead on arrival. The changelog around 2.51 does not
                  mention that the associated config.guess/config.sub
                  had a syntax error (it wrote extra text to the
                  output). This was silently fixed in the 2.52 version.
2.50 (2001-05-21) Do not use (alpha quality). It is compatible with 2.13
                  only for trivial configure.in's because the
                  conventions for cached information were changed.

https://invisible-island.net/autoconf/autoconf.html

[4] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-06/msg00006.html

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature