Thinking about the next stable release

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Hi all,

with the unstable releases switched over to Guile 2.2, I think it might
be a good idea to think about the next stable release. The last time,
for 2.22.0 in early 2021, we kind of coincidentally aligned with the
Debian freeze timeline for Bullseye. For the next release, Debian 12
"Bookworm", the preliminary freeze plan can be found here:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2022/03/msg00006.html

I'm not super familiar with Debian's freeze policies, so I'm CCing
Anthony Fok, the LilyPond maintainer in Debian. I would *guess* that a
potential LilyPond 2.24.0 would need to land in Debian before the Soft
Freeze, targeted for 2023-02-12? In any case, having a release ready
towards the end of this year would be the safer bet.

The reason I'm explicitly looking at Debian is that they currently
bundle Guile 1.8 in their package, which also serves as the basis for
Ubuntu's package. I'm sure they would be more than happy to get rid of
that 😉 The same holds of course for other distributions as well; the
guile1.8 package in Arch Linux is currently only required by lilypond,
and Fedora already ships an unstable release built with Guile 2.2.

So, what do people think: Would targeting a release towards the end of
this year be a reasonable thing?

If yes, there was some discussion in the past to make the release after
that a new major version to enable bigger changes, such as potentially
switching to Cairo. This would probably require removing some things,
such as the \postscript command, that we should properly deprecate one
stable release in advance... So the choices are:

0) Too early for a stable release, ok to miss the next Debian version.
1) Target a release towards the end of this year, but do not deprecate
things in anticipation of a new major version after; instead go for a
"regular" 2.26.0 afterwards.
2) Target a release towards the end of this year and deprecate things
that we want to remove in LilyPond 3.0 (the details should be discussed
in a separate thread, I think)

Cheers
Jonas

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