Re: Stable releases

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

ludovic.courtes@laas.fr (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Adding new C code (as is the case with the text collation bug) might
> indeed break builds on some platforms.

Yes.

Also, for anyone who might not be thinking about it, it's probably
worth keeping in mind that Guile builds on quite a few architectures,
and our current release policy attempts to account for that by calling
for the heaviest testing during the unstable to stable transitions (to
hopefully catch any bugs related to endianness, pointer size,
etc. that haven't been caught during the unstable development
process).

The assumption has been that any changes during a stable series will
be be well enough controlled that they won't be nearly as likely to
need that broader testing.

> If this is the case, then it may be the case that the series can
> hardly be regarded as "stable".  Adding new Scheme modules, however,
> is unlikely to break builds.

I agree that it's certainly less likely, but here are some things we
might want to consider:

  - This policy would raise a somewhat arbitrary
    implementation-related criteria for the addition of new features,
    i.e. "If you can write it in Scheme only, then it can go in,
    otherwise it has to wait."

  - Any added modules probably won't have been nearly as broadly
    tested as the rest of the modules in the tree.

  - A given stable release series would no longer map to a known and
    consistent set of features.  i.e. One wouldn't be able to say with
    certainty that 1.8 doesn't have SRFI-N.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592  F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4


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