[darcs-users] darcs 1.0.6 release

[Tommy Pettersson]

Zooko wrote:
>  * I would know that a new stable, tested, release of darcs is going to come
>    out within about X months.
> 
>  * I would know that if I am using darcs version 1.a.b that I can upgrade to
>    darcs version 1.a.b+e and get no interface changes, no added features, no
>    performance improvements, only bugfixes.

Juliusz wrote:
> Zooko,
> 
> What you're basically suggesting is the creation of a new ``critical
> bug fixes only'' branch at every release.  That's not a bad idea, but
> such a branch would need a maintainer.


I've been thinking about these ideas for a while. It would be
nice if I could issue new bugfix releases as soon as I pull new
bugfixes into stable.

With the current setup of the build system it would require a
new branch, as noted.

I've been playing with the idea to push new bugfix version tags
to darcs-stable. The building system could be modified to
rebuild the latest stable release tar ball with the latest
"stable" tag it can find, but then we must let go of specifying
the darcs versions in configure.ac and only store them in the
darcs repo meta data (as tags). One drawback is bugfixes can't
be "backported" if they happen to depend on patches with new
features. They could of course be recorded against the latest
bugfix version and accompanied with a resolution patch to the
stable repo, which is probably equal in extra work to backport
and later rollback a patch in a separate bugfix branch, but it
is something that must be done by the patch supplier, while a
backport can be done by the maintainer.


As for timely releases I think that won't help knowing what's
coming. The development of darcs is still very irregular; it
moves in leaps whenever some developer gets some time. After
three months there can be very little or very much to compile
into a new version.


-- 
Tommy Pettersson <ptp at lysator.liu.se>