Re: Meld 1.5.3 released

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 23 February 2012 20:22, Bálint Réczey <balint balintreczey hu> wrote:
> It would be nice to have even this information, but a tentative roadmap
> would be even better.

I've added what I have to the site on the development page.

> Right now I'm a bit confused, because on the new website there is
> nothing mentioning the difference between development and stable
> releases. (Is there any difference?)

The difference is pretty much what you expect: stable is what I
believe to be stable and done. This doesn't mean that unstable is
seriously unstable. Meld has a history of being fairly conservative
about large changes, and I try to keep to that. If I land seriously
invasive changes, I'll usually make a note about the fact.

Ideally, there would be a stable series, but in reality there just
isn't enough time and effort available to maintain a stable branch.
I'd love it if people stepped up to help and an actual stable release
series emerged.

> In Debian we have a bug requesting an upload of 1.5.3:
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=660523
>
> As a co-maintainer of the meld package I'm generally against uploading
> upstream's development releases to unstable, but since 1.5.3 seems to
> be stable and Julian's request makes sense.
>
> I would be much happier if I could upload 1.6.0, a release said to be a
> stable official release by upstream.

I can appreciate this, but it's also a fairly trivial distinction in
the case of Meld. If it makes you feel any better, I'm planning on
doing another one or two minor 1.5.x releases with fixes and updates,
and then declaring 1.6 done.

> I have a few questions which hopefully clarify the situation:
> How should we handle the Meld releases?

I'm the wrong person to ask... but I'd say that unless the release
notes say that something big changed, or you're on a very
breakage-averse distro, using the most recent Meld release will rarely
be a problem.

> Is the separation of development/stable releases still in effect?

Yes, but it's usually much less of a separation than other projects make.

That said, I expect to break things good n' proper with 1.7.0. You
might want to read the release notes before using that one.

> Can we expect a stable release in the coming few months?

Yes.

cheers,
Kai