Developers of Sympa

[Soji Ikeda <address@concealed>]

Hi Luc,

2018/10/16 21:06、Luc Didry <address@concealed>のメール:

> Hello,
> 
> If I understand well the branching convention of Sympa, sympa-6.2
> contains (obviously) the code of sympa-6.2.
> 
> We're now on a beta phase for 6.2.38 (well, 6.2.37 beta, that will
> become 6.2.38 once beta is finished).
> There is no, AFAIK, a 6.2.37 or 6.2.38 branches. So 6.2.37 is based on
> sympa-6.2 branch, right?
> 
> What happens for pull requests? They are for sympa-6.2 branch. Does it
> means that a merged PR during the beta phase would be in 6.2.37?
> 
> When creating a beta for the next release, shouldn't we create a new
> branch, of the name of the beta, that will only get bugfixes for the
> beta? (Those bugfixes would obviously need to get ported to the main
> (sympa-6.2) branch)
> It would improve the stability of the release, wouldn't it?
> 
> Think about it as feature-freeze, quite like Debian does a freeze when
> preparing its next release.
> 
> What do you think about it?

You aren’t wrong, but it depends.

Our software is not so stable as those Debian maintains.  To think about 
feature-freeze, we at first improve codebase to make it so stable that we can 
define “feature”.
I think we are working for such goal.  In the other words, currently Sympa is 
far from stable, even if it is “stable” release.

For example, see PR #424.  This was almost entire rewrite.  Older (currently 
I recommended) style of coding, accumulated contradictory modifications, 
dangerous behavior (or feature?), etc. etc.
Without getting rid of those, we cannot read and understand code well.
And, this is not only example —- rather such cases are usual in current 
codebase.

(On the other hands, continuous integration is not so bad for software and 
community.  So we would better to accept contributed improvements and to 
release it as fast as we can.)

BTW, I want to finish my “refactoring” work in this year (but it delays: 
maybe in the next spring).  I have reported my work twice or so by year.  
I’ll report the next time in December.  Please read it and give comments and 
suggestions.

                                  *

Anyways, I want to ask you to install recent version (either beta or git 
clone) on your pc and to check it! Please!
I’m very discontent that there seem very little people checking Sympa before 
stable release.

Honestly I think, currently, release process is not the point...

Regards,
— Soji




> Maybe I'm wrong, it may be already handled that way, but I see no clue
> that it's the case.
> -- 
> Luc
> "La route est longue, mais la voie est libre…" https://framasoft.org
> 
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> 
> 
> 
>