[poppler] Rethinking poppler releases

[Albert Astals Cid]

El Dijous, 25 de setembre de 2014, a les 21:30:54, Andreas K. Huettel va 
escriure:
> 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.

I can spend my time doing multiple releases or I can spend my time doing more 
reviews of the big pile of reviews, sincerely i prefer to do the reviews and 
if distros are going to be unhappy, well they have two jobs to do, get unhappy 
and then get happy again :D

Bottom line is, with reduced time i prefer to go to a "simpler" release 
schedule that lets us advance faster.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> 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