Re: GNUstep Release Cycle

[Riccardo]

Hey,

On Thursday, July 29, 2004, at 06:09 PM, Alex Perez wrote:

> When will the next release of GNUstep be made? In my opinion, when
> sufficient things have broken in -Base and -GUI in CVS that it 
> warrants a
> new release of an application such as Addresses, this is a clear
> indication that we should probably have already released something.
> Numerous somewhat-significant changes have been made recently (amongst
> them a bump to the GSNibVersion which /may/ cause problems with new nib
> files on old versions of GNUstep.

You always try to over-rush things, don't you?

I'd wait for a next release when the patch that David Ayers has for 
making Risc processor work fine again gets committed and binary 
compatibility could possibly be preserved.
This patch is essential to avoid signature errors on every processor 
that relies on registers to pass function/method parameters (that is 
every decently modern processor architecture). On some cpu's (like 
hp-pa) this cause seg-fault, on some others just errors/warnings.
I'd wait so that things stabilize and if binary compatibility cannot be 
preserved at least the break happens with a release and not the day 
after, making development a pain as always.

I'd be also very happy if the now (in)famous NSImage resize bug can get 
solved in time for a release.

I'd prefer few but "good" releases because for people that work with 
libraries in a distribution and don't track CVS, changes can cause a 
major pain for the user or a blocker for the releaser (like gentoo, 
which supports hppa, that can't run on it).

Release often, release early is a thing that only people like Linus can 
believe in.
I think that we should release regularly, but only if no big bugs are 
pending and big changes are not on the radar screen.

Some projects, like dillo, use a count-down mechanism: features are 
freezed and it is said that the version will be released if no new bugs 
are found, if one is found, it must get fixed and the counter starts 
again. This works quite well.

-Riccardo