Re: [GNUnet-developers] Towards a new formalized release policy

[Christian Grothoff]

On 03/28/2018 02:33 AM, Mike Mestnik wrote:
> This is great, there are several issues I had working with GNUNet that
> existed entirely because there were no current releases.
> 
> There are a few things to consider above simply having regular releases and
> that's handling changes that are incompatible with previous releases.  I
> would wager this will make LTS releases impracticable or impossible.

Now that's an interesting point to bring up, even though maybe a bit
premature.

> Things to consider for a new release are API changes and of course protocol
> changes.  The project ideally would avoid making ABI changes while not
> making API changes.  I would hope that adopting release goals would make
> out of tree applications easy or easier to maintain.

Well, there are several issues mixed up in here:
1) protocol changes: I have plans to add some limited protocol
versioning in the future, so that may help make backwards-compatible
changes -- sometimes but not always.  So yes, I still expect "scheduled"
breakage in the medium term.  In the long term, hopefully versioning
will do.

2) API/ABI changes: library versioning already should be applied here,
it would be good to improve out tooling to automatically adjust library
versions, but in general this should not be a major issue;

3) out-of-tree applications: I don't mind out-of-tree, but ideally our
CI should be setup so that we can support them by providing us a means
to detect _if_ API changes break them ;-).

My 2 cents

Christian

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