[GiNaC-devel] release

[Alexei Sheplyakov]

Hello,

On Thu, Dec 09, 2010 at 11:05:18PM +0100, 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.

Actually we don't. If something (bugfix or a new feature) introduces the ABI
change all we need is to bump the library version info (as described in
http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libtool.html#Versioning),
and put some prominent note into the ChangeLog.

> Merge eventually later. We might revert the patch because we found a better
> solution, and therefore have to branch again.

No, we just revert the bad patch and apply the new one.

> As a result our branch tags or version numbers would not only
> rise much faster (no problem, actually, unless distro maintainers
> feel annoyed),

No, they won't, if we update library version properly (that is, before
making a new release, not immediately after breaking the ABI).

> 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.

In fact there's no mapping between the package release number and the library
interface version. They are absolutely different, and there's no way to
tie them.

Best regards,
	Alexei