[poppler] Rethinking poppler releases

[Andreas K. Huettel]

Am Mittwoch, 24. September 2014, 00:51:06 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> Hi all, we released 0.26.0 five months ago. And we have no schedule for
> 0.28.0 (or i can't find no email discussing it).
> 
> This is something that has been happening repeateadly, we "forget" when the
> next feature release or we need to delay it because we only release it
> every so often and we *really* need a feature in.
> 
> I'd like to propose a change from having bugfix releases every month and
> feature releases every ~6 months to just having a release every month.
> 
> In that release we would introduce both bugfixes and features.

Hey Albert, 

first of all thanks a lot for your work, it's been a real pleasure packaging 
poppler. Especially also since soname / ABI / API changes have recently become 
much more rare.

To be honest I do not care too much when exactly you do the releases. 

However, stable / bug fix / security fix branches (in the sense that ABI and 
library sonames remain constant) are cool and useful. If you change ABI 
regularly and do not differentiate between patch and feature upgrades, you do 
the same as attempted in KF5, namely shifting the maintenance of crash / 
security / bugfix backports to the distributions.

So yes, distros won't like the change. 

Gentoo has actually the smallest problem since we can just tell people "update 
and rebuild reverse dependencies". Our package manager is set up to 
automatically rebuild everything linking to libpoppler.so when a version with 
new soname is installed (and only afterwards removes the old library).

Cheers, Andreas

-- 
Andreas K. Huettel
Gentoo Linux developer (council, kde)
dilfridge at gentoo.org
http://www.akhuettel.de/