Next focus: PROCESS

[Rob T]

On Tuesday, 11 December 2012 at 13:19:56 UTC, foobar wrote:
> First of all - Yay!
>
> There are still a few open questions that need to be decided
> before a suitable process can be defined.
>
> I'd say we should _at most_
> support _one_ previous stable version with critical bug fixes
> only.

I agree with that as well, although I think that after a new 
major "stable" release, the previously stable should be supported 
(at a minimum kept available for download) for some time until 
the new stable is fully stabilized and most people have been able 
to adopt it. It may be good enough to just and pick and choose if 
the previous stable should get certain bug fixes or not until the 
support period runs out.

> B. should we have public pre-release versions?

A lot of people will want to use the latest available changes for 
actual development, so the "testing" or "pre-release" branch 
should be public and kept reasonably stable, although anything 
can happen, so it's not considered "stable", just "stable enough" 
given that it may be supporting new features and improvements 
that have been selected for the next major stable release.

> I think we should release additional "releases" - call them 
> beta,
> pre-release, release candidates, whatever. These are for staging
> changes, allowing to field test new features and language 
> changes
> before they are made final. Also allowing users to adjust their
> code-bases.

I think you'll need at a minimum experimental branches for 
testing out new ideas, the main development branch witch is 
considered unstable (the master branch is probably best for this 
one as was suggested), a pre-release or testing branch that is 
used for preparing for the next major stable release, and of 
course the current stable branch which only receives bug fixes up 
until the next pre-release branch is merged into stable.

One more thing, is that we should adopt a version numbering 
system that is appropriate to indicate major, minor, and bug fix 
releases. The method of major.minor.revision can work well for 
us, but there may be alternatives that will work even better 
depending on what the process ends up being.

What I'd hate to see continuing, is a major new release going out 
with no indication in the version number that it is a major new 
release as opposed to a minor revision change. For example, the 
current DMD stable is 2.060, and the next release will be 2.061, 
but it includes brand new poorly tested features, and one of them 
is still being debated on, therefore it may be subject to change. 
The next release will be anything but a minor update and it 
should not even be considered as a stable release, it's more like 
a pre-release version for testing and for adoption by those who 
absolutely need the latest "reasonably stable" version for their 
development work.

--rt