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Re: gnustep release numbers


From: Helge Hess
Subject: Re: gnustep release numbers
Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 21:28:49 +0200

On Oct 4, 2006, at 18:42, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
Note: by 'unstable' I don't mean that the code itself is buggy but that the ABI is unstable.
Fair enough ... that's your definition ... but it's rather an unusual one.

Really? I think thats the term usually used by OpenSource projects. But anyway ;-)

Stability is an inherent requirement for Linux distributions because they can't change the ABI constantly. Which makes it a cycle of ~2 years for all (serious) distributions. But at least 12 months.

In fact not all GNUstep releases change the ABI,

See my other mail. According to the changelog all the late GNUstep releases always changed the ABI.

but the ones which you term 'stable' are what are generally called bugfix releases.

Yes, 'stable' is the branch. And individual release after the first release of the stable branch is a bugfix release.

There are very few of those in GNUstep ... not because there are no bugs, but because we generally lack the manpower (volunteers with the inclination to do it) to make lots of bugfix releases.

I honestly don't think that this is a major issue. Those people who need a stable release and have issues with a certain bug will backport fixes (not trunk developers).

Most likely this doesn't need to happen very often because gnustep- make and gnustep-base code is in fact largely bug free. The changes in those libraries are additions/fixups to the API, code improvements/ rewrites, performance updates, etc.

And of course the interest in providing bugfix releases to a stable branch increases as the number of stable branches is reduced. Leading to solid software :-)


However, it should be easy to tell a bugfix ('stable') release ... it has the same major and minor version number as a normal release, but an incremented subminor number.

Yes. But prior having bugfix releases we need a stable branch. One which doesn't change ABI every 3 months but lasts for at least a year, better two. We don't have that.


Anyway, not sure whether we can find a solution here. We didn't found one in past discussions :-) Which I find a bit unfortunate because the code itself of gnustep- base/gnustep-make is stable for such a long time.

Greets,
  Helge
--
Helge Hess
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/helge/






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