Stable branch releases

[Mikael Djurfeldt]

The discussion has been up before about having an "unstable"
development branch and a "stable".

For example, Miroslav Silovic has recently found a serious bug in
Guile-1.4, one which is insidious and can make programs copying arrays
just quietly give the wrong numbers...

Rob Browning has offered to provide a patch against Guile-1.4 with
fixes for the more serious bugs in order to make it possible for us to
make a bug-fix release.

He seems further willing to continue doing that kind of work, because
it mixes well with his rola as Debian maintainer for Guile.  (He gets
a lot of bug reports and need to fix them in the Debian package, but
would prefer to have an upstream release instead to keep the Debian
sources close to upstream.)

The main argument against splitting into stable/development branches
before was our limited resources.  Now, since we have a volunteer for
the task, maybe that argument isn't as strong anymore?

I suggest that we split development into a stable and unstable branch
in the CVS repository.  We can, for example, have the development
version as the trunk and fork off the stable branch for each main
release.  I further suggest to give Rob Browning write access to CVS
and appoint him "stable release manager"---let him do the releases.

Maybe we should also extend the current version numbering scheme so
that the stable branch as an even second number?  (How should this
work together with the current third digit convention?  We have to do
something.  What?)

What do you say?

Best regards,
/mdj