Apart from my other long rambling, another scheme has occurred to me. What if we drop the major version number entirely, and forget about a 1 or a 2 or a 5, and just have a two-part version number that strips the leftmost digit off? The upcoming old-line release would be 7.3 (still called 1.7.3 for continuity with the past releases of its line) and the new one would be 8.0. We could increment the 8 with about the same regularity and for about the same reasons as we would have incremented the minor version number before. 1.7 was clearly different enough from 1.6 to be a 1.7 and not a 1.6.x++, though I no longer remember quite why. Likewise 1.6 was definitely a 1.6 and not a 1.5.x++.
This actually seems reasonable, rather than whimsical, even though I came up with the idea in a rather whimsical fashion. And with respect to my other long rambling ponder about regular and predictable release intervals and life and frustration and the meaning of Pi, I should add that while I think it's hopeless to say we're going to release in April and September, or whenever, I still think we have a better working scheme now since I took over the releases, and this scheme is workable. I have a low bar for when it's "ready" and I'd rather just get it out the door as soon as the activity level of the latest random burst of energy tapers off. This hasn't been entirely successful, because I've still had some people coming in out of nowhere and changing things at the last minute after I thought everything was wound down to a halt, but I think it's basically a workable strategy. Forget trying to release every six months. I don't think we can ever manage to get work done on that regular a timeframe again from here. Instead, just keep releasing whatever is in the pipeline whenever it seems fairly stable, and has had some half-assed testing. That's what the last two releases were, and if we hadn't been stuck in limbo trying to avoid working on the old code, we'd probably be up to 1.7.5 or 1.7.6 by now. The only big argument against that is trying to keep up with the major distro's schedules, and time our own releases so that we can have the latest version included with the latest version of theirs. Especially Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS. But in practice, this just hasn't been working out despite the best of intentions anyway. I think it's pointless to bother with that kind of timing. I do think it's very much worth pursuing some mechanism for making the newest available to everyone though. Firefox does it, and I don't even know quite how. It's a distro-installed package that somehow manages to update itself without root access, and I have no idea how the mechanism works, and don't really care as a user. Couldn't we do something similar? I think will all our stuff crammed into one ridiculously enormous rosegarden binary, we almost certainly could. -- D. Michael McIntyre ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
