Forwarding to ring@ as many users may have insight or be impacted. ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: "Alexandre Viau" <alexandre.v...@savoirfairelinux.com> To: ring-...@lists.savoirfairelinux.net Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 12:05:16 PM Subject: [ring-dev] First Ring Release + tagging + stable channels
Hello ring-dev! We are moving towards the first release and we have to make a decision as to how how we intend to support the release. Here are the questions we should answer: - Do we want a repository with only tagged releases, and not weeklies? One idea would be to have two repositories, one with weeklies and one with only tagged releases. What could happen is that we make breaking changes and weeklies users may be unable to communicate with the users of the tagged releases. I think that this is a risk that they should accept if they chose to use the weeklies. - Do we want to be included in distros stable releases? I am able to influence Debian's decision as to if we are included in the next stable release. Distributions are unlikely to go against our decision. When we release ring, we should include a message that indicates how committed we are to supporting the release. If we make it clear that we don't intend to fix security issues, distributions are likely to keep us in unstable repositories. Stable releases generally last about two years. Are we ready to support a version of ring for two years? If they end up with a non-working version of ring, this could be bad publicity for us and users may dismiss ring because it doesn't work in their stable distro. Being included in stable releases will greatly increase the accessibility of ring, there is a good portion of non-technical users that chose not to add extra repositories to their distro. Techniques like apt-pinning that allow users to use only some packages from unstable repositories are not user-friendly, we shouldn't expect non-technical users to use them. - Do we want to release the gnome client as a whole? We now have the ring-project repository on gerrit. This could allow us to build the gnome-client by statically linking lrc and ringd, without providing *-dev packages. The advantage of this is that no other package will be able to link against ring libraries, allowing us to update the libraries without breaking too many things. I cannot guarantee that this would be accepted by distributions, but this was seen in the past. In particular, this makes it easier for us to support a stable release and include security fixes without breaking things in other packages. The downside of this is that other clients won't be able to be packaged in the distributions without being included in the ring-project repository. Debian policy says this: (https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html) "In some cases, it is acceptable for a library to be available in static form only; these cases include: libraries whose interfaces are in flux or under development" An answer to these questions would be a good start. Cheers, -- Alexandre Viau alexandre.v...@savoirfairelinux.com _______________________________________________ Ring-dev mailing list ring-...@lists.savoirfairelinux.net https://lists.savoirfairelinux.net/mailman/listinfo/ring-dev _______________________________________________ Ring mailing list Ring@lists.savoirfairelinux.net https://lists.savoirfairelinux.net/mailman/listinfo/ring
