Re: Stable releases

[Rob Browning]

Neil Jerram <address@hidden> writes:

> If we followed this, I'm pretty sure the result would be more
> frequent stable releases than in the past.  I don't see any problem
> with that, in fact I think it would be a good thing... but then I've
> never prepared a release myself.  Is the release process
> sufficiently easy and automated that it would allow us to do this?
> And what does everyone else think about whether it's a good idea?

I think more frequent stable releases are a good idea, though at least
right now, there is enough by-hand work involved that I wouldn't want
to do it *too* often.  Of course I could probably automate things a
bit more. [1]

Note though, that one thing that is key to making more frequent stable
releases easy is careful discipline on the part of anyone committing
to the stable branch.  If everyone remembers to include the
appropriate ChangeLog, NEWS, etc. entries, then there's much less to
do at release time.  Otherwise, the diff against the last stable
release has to be examined more carefully, developers have to be
prodded, etc.

[1] It might be nice if there were a more automated way to generate
    the html and text NEWS summaries for the web pages and the list
    announcements.  I suppose I could just have the list announcement
    point to the web page, but I don't know how much people like
    having the summary in the message itself.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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