Re: grep project state

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

Thanks Julian for listing the steps. Could you add them to the development
web page for future reference? (I am waiting for my new employer to
approve the assignment of copyright to GNU.)

To keep the ball rolling on this ...

>   * prepare a Change List (distilled from the ChangeLog and bug tracker)

Is this basically extending the grep/NEWS file?

>   * decide whether to call it 2.5.3 or 2.6.0

I believe most of the previous discussion was in favour of 2.5.3, because
it is mostly a bug-fix release. I second/revoice this choice.

>   * make a Release Candidate package

Is this any different from the nightly CVS builds? See:

http://www.dal-acm.ca/~taa/grep/

Cheers,

TAA

-----------------------------------------------------
Tony Abou-Assaleh
Email:    address@hidden
Web site: http://taa.eits.ca
----------------------[THE END]----------------------

On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Julian Foad wrote:

> Claudio Fontana wrote:
> > it has been a while since I've made some minor contributions
> > to grep, and I was wondering what the state of the grep project is.
> > I am currently helping Karl with some project maintainment
> > tasks, and I was worried about grep not having a release
> > in quite some time, even though one would be very much
> > needed.
>
> Hello Claudio.  Sorry for the delay in replying.  I hope you don't mind me
> making this public.
>
> In my view, the state of the Grep project is that there are a lot of good 
> fixes
> in CVS and we should release a version as soon as possible, partly because a
> lot of people would be glad to have those fixes, but more importantly because
> making a release would encourage more people to get involved and fix the
> remaining bugs.
>
> There are some important bugs that have not been fixed in CVS, such as the 
> very
> slow handling of UTF-8 data, and also several little bugs and several proposed
> enhancements, but I really think it is best to try to release the fixes that 
> we
> have before working on more changes of any sort.
>
> I think we (anybody who is listening) need to do whatever we can to help get
> the current code tested and released.  We need the Maintainer's help with some
> steps, but we can do a lot on our own, like:
>
>   * prepare a Change List (distilled from the ChangeLog and bug tracker)
>
>   * decide whether to call it 2.5.3 or 2.6.0
>
>   * make a Release Candidate package
>
>   * submit the RC package to a translation team such as
>       http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=grep
>       (We should first merge in the work that they have already done.)
>
>   * review the changes (analyse them, check that they are documented, etc.)
>
>   * test the changes
>
>   * find out what else needs to be done to release an official GNU package
>
>   * spread the word to find more people who can help
>
> For example, once we have a Release Candidate, we should announce it on some
> very public place (such as SlashDot) to get help with testing it and then lots
> of people will be interested in getting it released officially.
>
> I think we should do these things first, and then ask Stepan to help with the
> few things that only a Maintainer can do.  I think he will be happy to help us
> if we do most of the work first.
>
> I wish I could make some time to help with this.  I mean to do so, and each
> time somebody like you writes to ask it makes me more interested in helping.
> (When nobody asks about it, I tend to forget about it.)
>
> Vivat Grep!
>
> - Julian
>
>