Re: after 3.2

[Thomas Weber]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 12:51:42PM +0100, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 9:07 AM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On 13-Mar-2009, Thomas Weber wrote:
> >
> > | That said, is there really a need to have two branches, stable and
> > | development? It seems the Linux kernel works quite nicely with just one
> > | branch.
> >
> > So just dismiss with the updates to the stable releases, and only have
> > a series of releases?
> >
> > That's fine with me, but it doesn't give people a lot of comfort when
> > there are bugs in a release and the next one might be N months away
> > and introduce a lot of new untested features that could cause more
> > trouble even if there are fixes for the problems found in the previous
> > release.
> >
> > The goal of the stable release series is to converge on something
> > that is more or less free of show-stopping bugs, even if it doesn't
> > have all the latest features.  But I'm not sure we do a good job of
> > that when we do more than fix regressions (and possibly other serious
> > bugs) in the stable release.  As Jaroslav noted, transplanting patches
> > from the development tree can have a destabilizing effect as the two
> > branches diverge.
> >
> > jwe
> >
> 
> To carry on the idea of linear development:
> I think we have essentially two groups of users using binaries: users
> of packages provided by GNU/Linux distros, and users of the Windows
> binaries.
> As for the distro users, it's just a question of how often they can
> make package updates. My impression is that most distros (e.g. Debian)
> have a fairly sophisticated auto-building systems, so that updating a
> binary package, say (a wild guess), once per month is not a big deal.
> Perhaps the package maintainers visiting this list can comment.

For Debian:
For Octave itself, once per month isn't a problem. However, there are
also the packages from octave-forge. If they need an update for an
Octave version, than once per month is off-limits. I'd say that building
2-3 octave-forge packages are about as much "work" as one Octave
package.

Where "work" means the time I actively spend on the packaging. It's not
like I'm supervising the compiler's output.

        Thomas