Next focus: PROCESS

[SomeDude]

On Sunday, 16 December 2012 at 15:05:58 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 12/16/12 6:15 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>> On 12/15/2012 09:39 PM, deadalnix wrote:
>>> Can we drop the LTS name ? It reminds me of ubuntu, and I 
>>> clearly hope
>>> that
>>> people promoting that idea don't plan to reproduce ubuntu's 
>>> scheme :
>>> - it is not suitable for a programming language (as stated 3 
>>> time now,
>>> so just
>>> read before why I won't repeat it).
>>> - ubuntu is notoriously unstable.
>>
>> Call them "stable release cycles" if you like, which is what 
>> they are
>> intended to be.
>
> Just one tidbit of information: I talked to Walter and we want 
> to build into the process the ability to modify any particular 
> release. (One possibility is to do so as part of paid support 
> for large corporate users.) That means there needs to be one 
> branch per release.
>
> Andrei

This sounds to me like a bad idea. And indeed, I haven't heard of 
any other project doing this.

If you do so, you'll quickly stop maintaining the older branches 
(especially when the corporate users pay for their specific 
developments), forcing users to hop to newer branches, with the 
possibility of breaking changes, so it's no different than 
today's situation.

If they really want specific developments, let them have their 
own branch and not interfere with a community driven process. In 
fact, I may sound harsh and a bit extreme, but I think paying 
users should have a priority to bugfixes and that's it, not on 
the development of the language itself, as they will attempt to 
rush half baked features.

I do think a bleeding edge branch and one or two stable branches 
(let's say one per year for the last two years) is good enough. 
And one branch for the paying user, which will merge to the 
bleeding edge if its specific developments prove worthwhile. But 
as soon as there are more than one paying user, it will 
instantaneously become impractical, so that really, they should 
just be limited to bugfixes.

BTW, will they share with the community their own developments ?