[poppler] Rethinking poppler releases

[Carlos Garcia Campos]

Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> writes:

> 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.
>
> We have been *very* good in the past with not introducing regressions thanks 
> to running the regression suite, so i think this is a good thing since it 
> makes it easier for our features to reach the users earlier (e.g. i have a 
> feature in poppler-qt that need to be released to make okular faster).
>
> The downside is that some distros won't like it, but honestly those distros 
> already don't update some of the minor releases because we do changes to our 
> internal APIs so one can't fix distros.
>
> Given the manpower we have at the moment (i.e. very low) i think a monthly 
> release (or maybe every two months) that contains both bugfixes and features is 
> the best for us.
>
> Comments?

My only concern is the new public APIs, as you said we don't usually
introduce severe regressions when adding features, but in the case of
new API things are a bit different. Breaking the API/ABI is problematic
for everybody, and having an unstable cycle gives you the chance to test
new APIs and change it if needed when actually used in the real
world. Of course I'm talking about the qt/glib APIs, not the internal
APIs.

We can make developer snapshots only when we introduce new API, and
allow adding features to the stable branch.

Since we don't match our schedule with any distro or any other project,
I don't see any problem if we don't release in time or whatever.

> Cheers,
>   Albert
>
>
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-- 
Carlos Garcia Campos
PGP key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x523E6462
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