On Tuesday, 11 December 2012 at 19:57:55 UTC, Rob T wrote:
On Tuesday, 11 December 2012 at 13:19:56 UTC, foobar wrote:
First of all - Yay!
There are still a few open questions that need to be decided
before a suitable process can be defined.
I'd say we should _at most_
support _one_ previous stable version with critical bug fixes
only.
I agree with that as well, although I think that after a new
major "stable" release, the previously stable should be
supported (at a minimum kept available for download) for some
time until the new stable is fully stabilized and most people
have been able to adopt it. It may be good enough to just and
pick and choose if the previous stable should get certain bug
fixes or not until the support period runs out.
By support I meant specifically _bug fixes_. You can already
download all previous released versions from the website and in
no way am I arguing to change that policy.
Even if we ever get to a point where we don't want to keep older
releases which I doubt very much (each zip is only a few MBs and
therefore insignificant on today's storage) - we could still
easily just checkout the specific release tagged in git and just
build that.
B. should we have public pre-release versions?
A lot of people will want to use the latest available changes
for actual development, so the "testing" or "pre-release"
branch should be public and kept reasonably stable, although
anything can happen, so it's not considered "stable", just
"stable enough" given that it may be supporting new features
and improvements that have been selected for the next major
stable release.
This is precisely what I addressed bellow. we have monthly build
of our staging branch - call them monthly betas that include new
upcoming features that are already stable enough to be released
to the public for field testing and are tentative for the next
actual release but until these feature actually get to a release
they hold no guaranties and can be further modified based on the
wider public testing - including changes in API. Once released,
they do hold such guaranties of API stability. So these monthly
betas will provide preview of language changes and allow people
to prepare for future changes and also provide feedback.
I think we should release additional "releases" - call them
beta,
pre-release, release candidates, whatever. These are for
staging
changes, allowing to field test new features and language
changes
before they are made final. Also allowing users to adjust their
code-bases.
I think you'll need at a minimum experimental branches for
testing out new ideas, the main development branch witch is
considered unstable (the master branch is probably best for
this one as was suggested), a pre-release or testing branch
that is used for preparing for the next major stable release,
and of course the current stable branch which only receives bug
fixes up until the next pre-release branch is merged into
stable.
See comment above. the pre-release will contain new features
already stable enough to be consumes by the general public
_before_ we the developers are ready to a commit finally to their
API. E.g. Walter's release of DMD with attributes that was
already tested and working but after release people argued about
changing its syntax from [attributes] to @(attributes).
developers can have their own experimental branches for their own
tests and new ideas, but once a feature reaches pre-release it
should already be tested and working and ready for public
consumption without commiting to a final API.
One more thing, is that we should adopt a version numbering
system that is appropriate to indicate major, minor, and bug
fix releases. The method of major.minor.revision can work well
for us, but there may be alternatives that will work even
better depending on what the process ends up being.
I really don't care about the numbering scheme and this is
irrelevant to the topic of this discussion. We are discussing the
PROCESS of development. How the releases are tagged is completely
beside the point and could be named after sweet delights, cat
names, Parks or even digits of PI. I really don't care and it
really is _not important_.
This is one of those fundamental things that are required to
truly understand git - versions are the _content_ (code) they
contain and are identified by a hash of that content.
This is pure bikesheding but why not: Why not extend the
astronomical theme to releases as well? What would you say about
the latest Pluto release of DMD? ;)
(Yeah, I know this is already used by the eclipse project..)
What I'd hate to see continuing, is a major new release going
out with no indication in the version number that it is a major
new release as opposed to a minor revision change. For example,
the current DMD stable is 2.060, and the next release will be
2.061, but it includes brand new poorly tested features, and
one of them is still being debated on, therefore it may be
subject to change. The next release will be anything but a
minor update and it should not even be considered as a stable
release, it's more like a pre-release version for testing and
for adoption by those who absolutely need the latest
"reasonably stable" version for their development work.
--rt
