Re: Proposal: Mandatory periodic releases

[Helge Hess]

On 7. Mrz 2006, at 16:41 Uhr, Adam Fedor wrote:
> Well, I try to do something like this, only I aim for binary  
> compatibility, rather than API stability. That's way too hard for  
> me to track - something that all the developers would have to sign  
> up to do, not just me. The last binary incompatible release was  
> September, last year (7 months).

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. Ensuring ABI/API  
stability just implies that every once in a while a new version is  
branched. This branch then is only allowed to add fixes, no new API/ 
ABI stuff.
"Development" of course will continue as usual (with breaking  
things ;-) in the trunk and with alpha releases.

Technically patches (aka bugfixes) to the branch could/should only be  
allowed for a release manager, could be you or someone else. A patch  
would need to ensure that nothing ABI/API is changed, this should be  
reasonably easy.

Since a stable release should happen max every 12 months this should  
be no big burden. And interest to provide fixes when necessary should  
be high because only stable versions (and API/ABI compatible fixes)  
are usually allowed in distributions.

Summary: IMHO this should be easy with Subversion. Just do a copy of  
trunk every 12/18/24 months and mark that the stable release and  
disallow changes.
This might imply that this only makes sense for core components like  
gstep-make and gstep-base since maybe gstep-gui has so many bugs that  
it doesn't make sense to tag a stable. Can't decide that.

Greets,
  Helge
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