Re: Ok to release GtkSourceView 3.24 in a few weeks?

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 01:28:49PM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-10-24 at 20:22 +0200, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> > And, the master branch is now ready for GtkSourceView 3.24. The
> > question
> > is: when to release it? Do we do a period of freeze? There are a few
> > changes for translations.
>
> I think you can do as you please, so long as you give sufficient time
> (say, two weeks) for translators to do their thing. You could release
> it alongside GNOME 3.22, for example.
>
> It might be less confusing to call it GtkSourceView 3.22.2, and just
> accept that it will have rather bigger changes than are typical for a
> stable release.

Mmh, not sure I like that approach.

It would require to change the "Since: 3.24" to "Since: 3.22" and
removing the versioning macros for 3.24.

At least two apps are already depending on GtkSourceView >= 3.23.1
(released yesterday). (on the master branch of those two apps, there is
no releases so it is also fixable).

For downstreams, I think it's important that they can trust us to not
sneak in unexpected things in new stable micro versions. New stable
micro versions should contain only bug fixes, sometimes performance
fixes and translation updates. So it is normally always safe, for
downstreams, to update to the latest micro versions of GNOME without
looking in details what changed for each module. If from time to time we
sneak in unexpected things, downstreams will no longer trust us. For
example in Debian stable, they already prefer keeping a GNOME module at
3.14.0 instead of updating to 3.14.2, even though 3.14.2 has important
bug fixes (but they have a strict policy to update packages during their
freeze). As an upstream developer, I don't like when distros keep the .0
micro version.

So, in summary, I would prefer calling GtkSourceView 3.24
"GtkSourceView 3.24".

--
Sébastien