On Tuesday, 31 July 2012 at 15:54:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
I thought a good thing to do is use branching for releases, and
that we can start doing that without much difficulty. No?
I think doing that would be a good idea. Some people might prefer
fancier branching schemes, given that handling them is much more
painless with Git than with SVN, but this doesn't prevent us from
implementing release branches as a first step.
What's also important from a »million users« point of view is
that the origins of every release artifact is traceable, both
internally and for users, both in terms of source code and
tools/commands to prepare the archives. This also applies to beta
releases: Please, PLEASE let's start to properly name them
(dmd-2.060-beta1.zip) along with tagging the respective revisions
in Git and keeping the old versions around, instead of just
overwriting a single archive with unknown (and routinely broken)
contents. Otherwise things are bound to become chaotic once more
than us 15-ish people actually test the betas.
Which reminds me: We really need to announce the beta releases
more publicly, i.e. in the forums, on the website, on Twitter,
IRC, etc. Once a release is out, we can't take it back, but I'm
sure there are many enthusiastic D users who wouldn't mind
running their projects/test suites against the compiler once
before the official release if they were only asked to. It's easy
to forget if you are subscribed to all the mailing lists, but the
visibility of an upcoming release is almost zero until it is out
of the door. Yes, we have [dmd-beta], but it takes extra effort
to subscribe to it – more people are subscribed to
digitalmars.D.announce via the mail gateway then to the
low-volume beta list!
David
