Re: Release plans
Mats Lidell writes:
>>>>> Stephen J Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org>
writes:
Stephen> But to me "producing releases" is not a goal in itself.
IMHO we don't need a five year plan at the moment. We just need to
plan the very next steps. My logic goes like this...
Sure. But Mike is proposing to branch without even that.
The facts are that we have a repo with an almost done GPLv3 or later
that I would like to get out because I think it will be beneficial for
future development. I hope you agree here. This is more or less the
current beta but with a license change.
No, the current beta is 21.5.29, which is almost 2 years old, and
there are many kB of ChangeLogs since then. The GPLv3 release will be
essentially the same as the *next* beta. My current XEmacs is clearly
not as stable for me as 21.5.29 was, although that may be as much due
to my hardware and changes in Gentoo and Mac OS X as to changes in
XEmacs. (I especially experience annoyance due to the X bug I
reported. I regularly hang in poll(2) on Gentoo Linux.)
Still I think this is important enough to warrant a version number
bump.
As just another developer (ie, I'm not wearing my Release Manager hat,
so you can ignore me if you wish :-) I disagree. A version bump says
to the world, "we're done, this is what you've been waiting for!"
Nobody is waiting for a GPLv3 XEmacs except us developers, though.
What they are waiting for is an XEmacs synched to Emacs, which happens
to require GPLv3. This is not what the GPLv3 merge will provide. So
bumping the version for that alone says the wrong thing to almost
everybody.
OTOH, people who care about GPLv2 can use the last-GPLv2-XEmacs tag
which will be applied to that version. That's currently one person,
Julian Bradfield. (Vin already has everything he wants from 21.5, I
suppose.)
For doing version number bumps I guess we need to do a
release. Normally a release means something new, complete, etc. This
time it does too. A new license. 21.5 will end its life with a release
note that basically states that this is the end. Whatever bugs that
are there will be fixed in the GPLv3 or later version.
If the Review Board decides to go this way, I won't veto it. But I'll
say now and in later discussion, I think this is more fuss for the
sake of fussing.
Note that this doesn't mean that we can't decide, on the basis of some
amount of discussion, that there really isn't that much that needs to
be fixed, make a short list of what does need to be fixed, fix it, and
release a new version fairly quickly. But GPLv3 is not enough for a
version bump without making some effort to ensure the released XEmacs
is usable.
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