On Tuesday, April 5, 2016 at 2:28:34 AM UTC-5, Dominique Pelle wrote: > Bram Moolenaar wrote: > > > I have been wondering if the next release should be called 7.5 or 8. > > We have quite a few new features, but not that many as with the Vim 7 > > release. Well, that was a big release. I think the most important > > addition since then is persistent undo in 7.3. Now we have more new > > features than in 7.3 or 7.4. 7.1 and 7.2 were mostly bug fixes. > > 8.0 or 7.5 is a bit arbitrary without conventions such as: > - major version number increased when breaking backward > compatibility (which should be rare) > - middle version number increased when adding new features > - minor version increased for bug fixes
I informally think of Vim by putting the patch number as a third minor version, similar to the "Semantic Versioning" standard (http://semver.org/) that we use at my place of employment. For example, instead of "Vim 7.4, patches 1-1726," I mentally think, "Vim 7.4.1726". Maybe it's time to make this an official nomenclature? This does break the model where some people selectively cherry-pick patches, and use something like, "Vim 7.4 with patches 1-5,9-33,1024-1726." In the "old days", sometimes people lacked quality Internet access to the old CVS repository and would have to manually patch their Vim source code from the emailed diffs. If they were only concerned with Vim on a given architecture, they could theoretically skip patches that didn't apply to them. I would argue that number one, this is NOT a good idea, because the source code changes are cumulative. Trying to do regression testing on 7.4 plus every combination of the current 1726 patches would be nearly impossible to implement and manage. I think you should always apply ALL the patches, even the ones that might not apply to your situation, just to avoid side effects. Number two, I don't think this use case still applies. I doubt that very many people still download a tarball of the Vim 7.4 source code, and then manually apply each and every diff based on the email attachments from Bram. I could be wrong, but Internet access is more common now, and ever since we switched to first Mercurial and now Git it has become very easy to get the latest "snapshot" of the code. Finally, this is just a hunch, but I bet most maintainers that bundle Vim for various operating systems just bundle up the latest stable patch release when they do a freeze. So I do not have a strong opinion on whether or not we call the next generation version 7.5 or 8.0. I do, however, think we should start appending the patch level as the third "minor" release number. Thoughts? -maj -- -- You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to vim_dev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
