Re: address@hidden: Re: Possible help with stable Emacs releases.]

[Rob Browning]

address@hidden (Kim F. Storm) writes:

> Yes, and it is VERY confusion --- since X.Y.Z.NN is really a pretest
> of X.(Y+1)

I think that's one of the motivations for projects that have gone to
the even/odd MINOR convention given the MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO versioning
style.  Then you can release as many odd-numbered versions as you
like, as long as everyone knows the convention.

Changing to that approach in guile has been fairly successful, though
there are still issues.  For example, for the final tests of a
X.EVEN.0 candidate (say 1.6.0), you may not want to test something
that's actually numbered 1.5.43 in the code, and then change the
version to 1.6.0 just before making the release build.  Even if that
final build has no other changes, it still hasn't been tested.

The solution I'm currently using for guile is to actually version the
final release candidate as the final release, i.e. 1.6.0, but to name
the pre-release tarfiles as guile-1.6.0rcN.tar.gz rather than
guile-1.6.0.tar.gz, and then place them on alpha.gnu.org.  In all
other ways, the release candidate tarfile *is* the tarfile that will
become the final release, if no relevant bugs are found.

Actually, that's not exactly right.  I'm also considering placing a
file inside the pre-release indicating that it's a pre-release and
indicating which pre-release.  When a pre-release (rcN) tarfile
finally checks out and is ready to become the the final release, that
"pre-release indicator" file will just be removed without building a
new dist via tar --delete or similar.

This will still leave misleading things like "Guile 1.6.0 released."
in a pre-release ChangeLog (when it should really say "Guile 1.6.0
release candidate N.", but in my estimation that's better than
alternatives that would require another CVS commit, and building an
untested new distfile.  Also, since the pre-releases will only be
uploaded to alpha.gnu.org, it seems unlikely that someone would end up
accidentally confused.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592  F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4