[Monotone-devel] Re: Release/Migration plan for monotone?

[Graydon Hoare]

Chad Walstrom wrote:
> "Justin Patrin" <address@hidden>  wrote:
> > *18*? Wow, that's a bit behind the times. A lot has changed.
>
> It's not so hard to imagine.  For example, Debian stable ships with
> Monotone 0.18, and some people are happy working with packages only
> found in the stable release of their favorite distributions.
>
> It would be interesting to know what the upgrade path would be from
> these old versions of Monotone.
>
> One way to keep packages out of Debian Stable is to file a release
> critical bug against the package stating that it's "alpha" software
> and that it changes too often to be included in a "stable" release.
> Of course, this is a bit too late now. ;-)

Yeah. We're sort of in a weird boat because we've made quite an emphasis 
on *reliability*, so the program appears sort of "mature-ish" to many 
observers. But we haven't settled (yet) on a policy of *stability* to 
match the policy of reliability; we still make changes pretty 
frequently. So people get upset that they have to run migration commands 
frequently, or have frequent protocol flag days.

That said, each release has contained forward-migration capability, and 
we *are* working towards a 1.0 release. The list of things to do before 
then has been shrinking for a while now, not growing. I expect  -- 
though of course cannot guarantee -- that we are in the last calendar 
year of pre-1.0 development now. Once we bless a release with that 
number, I at least intend to focus on stability on the 1.x line. So I 
will keep a branch alive called "1.x" which maintains:

  - stability of command-line, automate and hook interfaces.
  - stability of database, wire-protocol and data formats.
  - best-effort at migrating pre-1.0 stuff into 1.x series.
    (some data degradation is inevitable, as there have been bugs)
  - reasonably timely security-related updates.
  - tuning, optimizations, cosmetic bug fixes, at a slow rate.
  - documentation corrections.
  - some of the roadmap items listed as JANITORIAL.

I don't know what other people feel like, but I've sort of lost the fire 
for really active hacking on monotone. I want it to calm down and be 
mature. My mental feature-to-do list currently contains:

  - management branches (plus using hashes for key and branch names)
  - ssh / pipe transport for netsync (mostly done, needs debugging)
  - partial pull (or something, maybe just decide against it)
  - merge into working dir (relatively easy)

-graydon