Re: Allowing rolling release packages on ELPA

["Bozhidar Batsov" <bozhidar@batsov.dev>]

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To be clear - I'm arguing against rolling releases, just pointing out they require a bit
of due diligence on their maintainers part.  But if someone requested this explicitly I guess
we can assume they know what they are doing. 

On Wed, Oct 26, 2022, at 8:58 AM, Payas Relekar wrote:
> I'd say this approach is quite feasible, there are even popular GNU/Linux
> distributions out there who don't do big timely releases, but have
> rolling package updates, one of them I've been using for years with zero
> issues.
> 
> This generally relies upon development and deployment being supportive
> of it.
> 
> Some developers prefer to do development in separate branches. Git makes
> this cheap and easy to the point of being free. When features/bug fixes
> are good enough they can be safely merged to master with little to no
> effort. Emacs itself does this quite often for big features
> (native-comp, pgtk, tree-sitter). This way master is almost guaranteed
> to be 'green'.
> 
> IMO the status quo is a good default, but having an option of rolling
> updates is good for developers that follow branched development.
> 
> "Bozhidar Batsov" <bozhidar@batsov.dev> writes:
> 
> > Instead of setting version numbers manually (e.g. 0.1, 0.2) upon release time,
> > with rolling releases every change (commit) pushed upstream results
> > automatically in a new release and a version bump, with the version being a
> > timestamp. E.g. if I push 3 commits one day with some time between them this
> > will result in 3 releases. I think it's a great approach for snapshot (devel)
> > repos, but I'm not so sure about "stable" repos, as it kinda of implies that the
> > author will never have their project in an inconsistent state (e.g. halfway
> > towards a new feature).
> >
> > This approach was made popular by https://melpa.org/
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 25, 2022, at 11:14 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> >> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> >> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> >> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> >>
> >>   > I have heard from people who prefer a rolling release model for their
> >>   > packages,
> >>
> >> Can you explain what that means, concretely?  How is t different from
> >> what we do now?
> >>
> >>               and requested that their packages not be added for {Non,}GNU
> >>   > ELPA if they would have to update the version header manually,
> >>   > presumably on every commit.
> >>
> >> Is this something we would _want_ to do?  What would its implications
> >> be for Emacs?
> >>
> >> We might decide to support their style of release, or decide not to
> >> include their packages in NonGNU ELPA, or we might come up with
> >> another solution.  I don't know what's best.  But I'm sure we should
> >> think about that before we decide.
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
> >> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> >> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> >> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> 
> --
> 

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