Hi folks, We're one week out from the 1.24.0 release, which has been largely successful; about 15 distributions are carrying it per repology.org,[1] and the Savannah bug tracker has not been bombed insensate by reports of difficulties with it. Even HP-UX 11.31 for IA-64 (Itanium) has 1.24.0. For a purportedly dead OS[2] on a purportedly dead machine architecture,[3] that's twice in a row they've gotten a new groff release integrated within mere days of upload.
I guess rumors of death really do get exaggerated. In other news: I plan to do a point release on or about 14 March. The reason is that I made a boo-boo that some of you will have already noticed. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?68115 Since tagging 1.24.0, I've been pushing only documentation (and other non-code) fixes to the master branch, so those will be swept up in the point release as well. Why wait another week? 1. More issues warranting a point release could arise. None of Debian, Fedora, or openSUSE have yet packaged groff 1.24.0, and as these distributions have large user bases, if they get that done in the next few days, something troublesome might come to light. 2. I might find other ways to improve documentation. Because of the (highly) constrained nature of the changes, I don't plan to issue release candidates for 1.24.1. If anyone (including me) commits a "thawing" change to the master branch, changing C/C++ or macro package logic, I'll simply create a new branch from the previous commit. Doing so might prove fortuitous anyway in the event we find ourselves needing to release a 1.24.2. And for groff 1.25, I still want to do a time-based release, eschewing release goals in favor of shipping whatever good stuff gets done in time. Four weeks of release candidates in the field seem ample. It may even be too long a time--if anyone had tried groff 1.24.0.rc3 or .rc4 with a man(1) pipeline that ran neqn(1), we'd have caught bug #68115 while still in the pre-release phase, but apparently no one did, or it only affected a few man pages. I recall reading something that suggested the latter here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=312465 ...but I can no longer fruitfully access that URL. (Have the censors struck?) So I'd like to aim for a C/C++ code freeze on or about 3 June, followed by an all-other-code freeze on 17 June, and shoot for a final release on or about 1 July. The fruits of that effort will inform plans for a groff 1.26 release in about December. And from there, as I've suggested before, I'd like to shoot for a cadence of annual releases. Thoughts? Objections? Any _happy_ experiences with groff 1.24.0? :) Regards, Branden [1] https://repology.org/project/groff/versions [2] https://www.osnews.com/story/144094/hp-ux-hits-end-of-life-today-and-im-sad/ [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190416110949/https://www.anandtech.com/show/13924/intel-to-discontinue-itanium-9700-kittson-processor-the-last-itaniums
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