Re: [BuildStream] BuildStream releasing model

[Paul Sherwood <paul sherwood codethink co uk>]

On 2018-07-31 08:28, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> On Mon, 2018-07-30 at 16:51 +0200, Paul Sherwood via Buildstream-list 
> wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > as discussed on IRC today (from [1] onwards) I (and others) think 
> > that 
> > the BuildStream releasing model is confusing for new users and would 
> > like to suggest that we change it now, rather than later.
> >
> > IIUC understand it Tristan chose the current model because it is 
> > commonly used in GNOME projects, but I don't think that's a good 
> > justification.
>
> I most certainly did not, I have been using these versioning semantics

My mistake, then, sorry.

> for projects regardless of their association to GNOME, because the
> even/odd minor point numbering scheme provides context about what is
> stable/dev, where alternative numbering schemes don't communicate that
> well.

Please let's not use 'stable' since what engineers typically mean by 
'stable' is often not what users expect or need.

Please can someone spell out **the reasoning** for this odd/even model, 
without digressing to history or references from other projects.

My counter-proposal is:

1) we tag a release from time to time (frequency tbd... let's guess at 
quarterly). new users are told to use the latest tag
2) after the release we merge some new functionality, test it, fix the 
breakages, and ensure that we are backwards compatible with content from 
our previous releases
3) we tag a new release
4) we tell existing users to migrate forward to the latest release 
within a time window (tbd, let's say 1 year)
5) if we identify crash/security bugs we make them in master then 
cherry-pick/backport to old supported tags, or state that we have to EOL 
old tags early

I'm suggesting this to emphasise that I think we should always have one 
release live, and one that we are working towards, and everything else 
is secondary.

I've been wrong before, so please help me understand my errors here...

br
Paul