Richard,
you outline the scenario as an either/or (more frequent vs less
frequent) while IMHO its quite the contrary. The current situation
suits neither of the "camps", for most its too slow, for some its (by
far) too fast. I don't think there is anyone who wants an "almost
stable" version.
I think my proposal suits _both_ camps much better. It allows for
more frequent alpha releases while at the same time allowing for a
stable release.
Why? Currently you have a mixed situation where you even make bugfix
releases for unstable releases (1.10.1, 1.10.2 etc). In my scenario
you have one version where you don't need to care at all about
backwards compatibility and just *one* which you keep ABI stable.
Your suggestion that one can just "stop" updating is really
incomprehensible. By this you suggest that everyone who wants to use
GNUstep libraries in broader deployments needs to maintain his own
stable branch (and pkgs for distris). Well, at least for us thats
(much) more work than just staying with libFoundation. And it
wouldn't really be GNUstep anymore anyway but a fork. I think I can
safely assume thats exactly the same for other people (if there are
any ;-) who actually want to use GNUstep in a setting with out-of-the-
house deployments.
We recently upgraded libFoundation from 1.0 to 1.1 which in fact was
a major migration (and amount of confusion) for users (which 95% use
binary packages).
Notably we did this in our unstable branch (OGo 1.1). I guess that
the users which use the ages old but rock solid OGo 1.0 and the ones
which use OGo 1.1 is about 50/50. Even the latter complain with
1.0=>1.1 changes ;-)
Anyway, don't mind ;-) IMHO we can stop the thread now, the proposal
doesn't matter for people who really use GNUstep now. So it won't
change. As always.
Greets,
Helge
PS: "So GNUstep releases are now 'stable' because each release starts
a branch in svn where bugfixes can be applied ... this is a purely
academic distinction". Of course this is nonsense. A branch itself
doesn't make a version stable, but a branch can be marked as a stable
branch (eg by an even version number ;-). Declaring something
"stable" is a commitment/discipline not to change the ABI of that
branch in the next n months, nothing technically enforced (well, real
projects have release managers ;-)
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