[GiNaC-devel] release

[Richard B. Kreckel]

Hi!

On 12/09/2010 11:05 PM, Jens Vollinga wrote:
> Thinking about the future this might lead to some odd (to me!) branching
> behaviour (I don't know whether odd==bad, though). As soon as someone
> makes a commit that introduces "incompatibility" we would need to
> branch. Merge eventually later. We might revert the patch because we
> found a better solution, and therefore have to branch again. As a result
> our branch tags or version numbers would not only rise much faster (no
> problem, actually, unless distro maintainers feel annoyed), but we could
> for example have a version 11-2 which is binary compatible to a version
> 14-0 but not to versions 12-x or 13-x. The mapping between repo branches
> and version branches becomes non-trivial. Rising version numbers would
> no longer signify a real progress (don't as for a definition! ;-) ) but
> just documents in the branch "bumps" along the master. This is an
> disadvantage to me.
>
> I have no strong opinion yet whether the advantage you outlined
> outweighs the aforementioned disadvantage. I'd like to hear more
> opinions or arguments.

Putting my distributor's hat on:
* Distros should steer clear of stuff from unreleased branches. If they 
fail to do so they cannot blame upstream for anything.
* Distros don't like library soname changes. Let's stick to the current 
one as long as possible.
* If, at some point, 14-0 restores compatibility to 11-2 or the other 
way around, that would just be seen as an uninteresting quirk.

Bye!
   -richy.
-- 
Richard B. Kreckel
<http://www.ginac.de/~kreckel/>