[M3devel] Release Engineering: 5.8 --> 5.9? was: Re: release vs. head?

[Olaf Wagner]

Quoting Jay K <jay.krell at cornell.edu>:

> Should we just make a new release branch?
> Or I keep copying stuff over somewhat selectively?
>   We do want LONGCARD in the release, I assume.
>
> I'll diff the two trees again, see what varies.
> Sometimes when I do that I find stuff to take.
>  And take the LONGCARD changes.

 From a release engineering point of view this is more or less
a nightmare. We cannot make incompatible extensions to the feature
set after the fourth release candidate.

The only clean way I'd see to even get the LONGINT changes into the
next release would be to start anew. Meaning declaring 5.8.4 as
the latest release and develop 5.9 on the trunk. Of course we'd
have to carefully merge back any fixes that might be missing on the
trunk right now.

That said, I have currently neither the time nor the energy to do all
that cleanly. I didn't even get round to set up release builds
on new.elego.de via Hudson in order to cover the FreeBSD4 target
platform we recently lost in the release due to my home machine's
complete crash in December. So the release engineering support is not
in the best of states I must admit.

I could live with declaring 5.8.RC4 as an intermediate release,
but somebody really needs to do all the housekeeping of comparing
and merging branches. And we shouldn't start a new release branch
until things have settled down.

Is anybody interested in taking over some of the release engineering
tasks (including Hudson management and re-targeting to the new release)?

Please keep in mind that we haven't managed to get out a stable release
for several years now.

Olaf
-- 
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