[rfc] six-month stable release cycles

[Martin Pool]

2009/7/30 Matthew D. Fuller <fullermd at over-yonder.net>:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 04:39:49PM +1000 I heard the voice of
> Martin Pool, and lo! it spake thus:
>>
>> The Proposal
>> ************
>
> Speaking as the maintainer of the FreeBSD port (and just to be sure at
> least someone isn't wholly in favor), this makes things a bit muddier.
>
> With the current system, it all Just Works.  A new release comes out,
> I update the port (tempered as necessary by my existing awareness of
> the development and known issues; that's the maintainer's job after
> all).  The given scheme basically reads as "everything like now,
> except that every 6th release gets more bugfixes backported and point
> releases made from it, we change the numbering scheme around".  This
> leaves me, as the maintainer, with several choices:
>
> 1) Package the biyearly releases.  This is an easy choice to make in a
>   mature product, but in something still relatively young (and still
>   making significant regular strides), that's kinda icky.  I mean, if
>   I wanted to always run outdated versions of everything, I could
>   just use Debian   ;)
>
> 2) Package the monthlies.  This yields, in effect, exactly the
>   existing situation, but will be harder for me to swallow and harder
>   if necessary to justify, since now it'll practically always be
>   called 'some.thing beta'.  Icky.
>
> 3) Deal with two ports, using the existing for either the stable or
>   monthlies, and creating a bazaar-ng-devel or bazaar-ng-stable port
>   for the other.  Liable to get me lynched by people concerned over
>   our dwindling supply of hyphens.  Does potentially ugly things to
>   dependancies of depending ports.  And, well, icky.
>
> 4) Resign maintainership, hop a flight to Tijuana, and forget
>   computers exist.  Not so icky, but my email would get pretty backed
>   up after a while...

RIght, I think those are basically the choices you have.  Given that
it's still possible to do #2, you are in a sense no worse off except
that:

 * some plugins may become less stable, if it turns out that plugin
authors focus mostly on the stable releases
 * you may as you say get flack that it's almost always a beta.
 * you need to think or talk about which one to do

Based on my understanding of the BSD process it seems to make sense to
put our monthly releases into CURRENT and the stable releases into
STABLE.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>