Re: Release what we've got?

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

I vote for the immediate release.

Lesson #7 from the Cathedral and the Bazaar:

"Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers."

Cheers,

TAA

--------------------------------------------------
Tony Abou-Assaleh
Ph.D. Candidate, Faculty of Computer Science
Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada, B3H 1W5
Fax:   902-492-1517
Email: address@hidden
WWW:   http://www.cs.dal.ca/~taa/
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On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Julian Foad wrote:

> I think it's time to lower our sights a bit and release Grep 2.5.2 with the
> fixes that are in CVS at the moment.  I feel that this would help a few users
> in a small way, but more importantly would focus more people's attention on 
> the
> work and encourage developers by demonstrating that it is possible to get the
> bugs fixed and released.  People would look at the new version, be glad that a
> few bugs are fixed, see that one of their favourite bugs is not fixed, and
> think "Now is the time to make an effort to get this bug fixed."
>
> It has been so long since the last relase that I think there is a bit of a
> feeling among many people that it is almost not worth attempting any fix
> because it is not going to go anywhere.  Personally, the main reason why I am
> not doing much is because I'm not good at motivating myself; I tend to do some
> work when somebody else mentions that it needs doing, or when somebody else
> posts a patch that sort-of does it, and there is not much activity on this
> mailing list to hold my attention.
>
> It would be nice, of course, to have more fixes in version 2.5.2, but fixes 
> are
> not being made quickly.  If we keep waiting, a few of us will make a few more
> fixes in CVS, slowly, and the rest of the world will still be waiting.
>
> This falls short of Stepan's plan for version 2.5.2 in
> <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grep/2005-03/msg00049.html>, but 
> there's
> no harm in calling the result of those things 2.5.3 instead.  There's no 
> reason
> to think that releasing the current version now will cause those further fixes
> to be delayed, except by the few hours of work required to make a release.
>
> Thoughts?  Would Stepan be prepared to make the release?
>
>
> Here is my first attempt at listing the changes in CVS.  The dates are just
> there to help me review the changes.  For example, instead of "Fix off-by-one
> error in prpending()" I want to discover and say what the user-visible effect 
> is.
>
> These are the user-visible changes since Grep 2.5.1 (2002-03-26),
> distilled from Changelog.
> ### Need to check and note whether a regression test is present for each fix.
>
>          Fix and update documentation and help text.
>
>          Fix or disable some regression tests which were failing; add some 
> more.
>
> 2005-04-29
>          Fix bug #9768: "echo FOO | grep -io FoO" gave no output; should
>          print "FOO".
> 2005-04-12
>          Fix a seg-fault in "-o -i": patch #1939.
> 2003-01-18
>          Fix -i -o combination (Patch from Tim Waugh)
>
> 2005-04-28
>          Fix a DFA bug whereby a bracket "[" was matched by the
>          pattern "[[:alpha:]]" in UTF-8 locales.  Patch #3800.
>
> 2005-04-27
>          Fix a bug reported in patch #1834 whereby "grep -Fw"
>          would miss matches after a non-word occurrence of the pattern.
>
> 2005-04-12
>          Fix off-by-one error in prpending().  Patch #3840 by Claudio Fontana.
>
> 2005-04-11
>          Fix bug #9519: "echo do^re | grep do^re" was failing to find a match.
>
> 2005-02-22
>          Fix bug #4531: "echo a | grep -P '(?s)a.*'" would segfault.
>
> 2004-12-16
>          From http://oss.software.ibm.com/linux/patches/?patch_id=25
>          Patch for i18n correctness.
>
>
> - Julian
>
>
>