Re: Next release from master

[Daniel Colascione]

On 01/18/2016 01:13 PM, John Wiegley wrote:
>>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>>> master should become emacs-26 at some point in the future, once it's ready,
>>> while emacs-25 should only continue to improve and stabilize the 25.x
>>> series.
> 
>> Are you changing your mind? ;-) You told me something different in
>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-11/msg01372.html.
> 
> Yes, I suppose I am.
> 
> 'master' should be a place where people can commit API-breaking changes once
> they are ready for general consumption; otherwise, such changes would have to
> live in feature branches for a very long time, and we'd have little ability to
> test them in combination.
> 
> However, changes of that magnitude shouldn't happen between 25.1 and 25.2;
> that's not what a minor release means to me. When things really start
> changing, we should think of them as going into the next major release.
> 
> Therefore, the emacs-25 branch will stabilize over time until there's nothing
> more to do there. Although many will abandon the branch altogether in favor of
> master at some point, there might still be some who wish to fix bugs there and
> call for a point release.
> 
> I imagine this will lead to more frequent major releases, and fewer point
> releases, but that really depends on what we're doing. The more bug work we
> do, the more point releases; the more feature work, the more major releases.
> 
> I'm not sure that I'm calling for anything radically different than what has
> happened before, though.  Are you saying that in the past, what is now master
> would become 25.2? What then of features that are destined for 26 and not
> future versions of 25.x?
> 
>> You seem to be talking about something that never happened before in Emacs:
>> we never left any branch "for maintenance", we left it for good. Once the
>> decision was made that the next release will be from master, the branch was
>> abandoned, and never revisited except in emergency (e.g., if some
>> super-critical bug was reported in the last release that required an urgent
>> fix).
> 
> Yes, I may be talking about something that never happened before in Emacs, but
> it's been valuable on other projects, so I thought we might try it here as
> well.
> 
> That said, if a shift to master means no one ever fixes another bug on
> emacs-25, then there will be effectively no change; but the branch can still
> hang around for a while, and be available for point releases if necessary.
> 

I'd be happy with switching to a less-like release scheme and
incrementing a single number. Do minor releases even make sense anymore?

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