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

[Olaf Wagner]

Quoting Tony Hosking <hosking at cs.purdue.edu>:

> I think that we are closest now to a release we can be happy with   
> than for some time.  It would be a huge shame not to push this out   
> the door.

OK, I doubt there is very much interest from other users how we do this,
so let's be unorthodox again ;-) Let's just stick to the existing
release branch and let RC 5.8.5 be somewhat incompatible with RC 5.8.4.
Everything else would be too much hassle for too few users
(at least I think so). As I doubt there's anybody who wants to start
the release engineering again, we will just use the existing branch
and move forward.

Any objections?

Olaf

> On 17 Jan 2010, at 06:38, Olaf Wagner wrote:
>
>> 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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