Hi, I've released libav 10_alpha1 earlier this day. The download tarball is located as usual at http://libav.org/releases/. Alpha releases are something special that we haven't done before, I think. Please let me explain how they work:
Alpha releases are cut from master. Therefore, they constitute snapshots of master and there is little difference to just using http://libav.org/releases/libav-snapshot.tar.bz2 other than that we retain the release tarball (the -snapshot tarball is updated nightly). The point of alpha releases is to let distro packagers update their packaging and doing test rebuilds of our downstreams. Since every release deprecates and removes old APIs, this will generally cause some churn. The idea is to have defined point in git history from which we can start with testing and evaluating how to proceed. I generally see the following different ways how to proceed: a) we find that the alpha releases is pretty good, and can be more-or-less released as it is. b) we find that there are a lot of issues in the alpha, which are already fixed in master. In case of a), we can create a release branch starting from the tag that marks the alpha release, and backport only "important" patches as we usually do with point release. From that, we proceed with the beta releases as we've used to do with earlier releases, and eventually release v10 final. I personally fear that we will rather run into b). In that case, let's have another 10_alpha2 releases, again cut from master. We may find that we need to bump further major versions of our libraries for alpha2. We may re-introduce deprecated APIs if necessary, or apply further changes to existing API until we come to conclusion a) and proceed as outlined above. As you can see, we there are no strong promises regarding alpha releases. Therefore, I'm not even sure if we need a website announcement. If someone feels like writing one, please be sure to include some prettified version of my notes from above. I personally am unlikely to write one in a timely manner, as I'm travelling until the end of the year, so I welcome anyone to pick it up from here. And as soon as time permits, I will start with an Ubuntu PPA and recompile all packages to assess the fallout. Happy holidays // Merry Christmas! Reinhard -- regards, Reinhard _______________________________________________ libav-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libav.org/mailman/listinfo/libav-devel
