Re: Is there any release plan in near future?

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Sun, 2008-12-07 at 15:49 +0800, Wan, Shuang wrote:

>          I am an engineer at Intel. Now I take charge the Tinymail
> full API testing. After several weeks work on tinymail,

Hi there, nice meeting you!

> I noticed that the source code in trunk are different to formal
> release for example debug message and assert. 
> 
> Also the API in trunk had some changes to last release 0.0.9. So I
> want to know is there any release plan in near future?

The plan for near-future is to make a Tinymail 1.0 released based on
current TRUNK.

All releases so far have been tagged with "pre", meaning that they are
no official releases.

Starting 1.0 we will create a branch per major release. Each such branch
will guarantee API and ABI stability. The creation of such a release
will also mean the start of a new major release in TRUNK. It's likely
that projects working on an E-mail client will continue sending fixes
and patches for the 1.0 branch, but any such patch will have to
guarantee API and ABI stability and will go in that branch on top of
going into TRUNK (if it makes sense to port it up).

If it's not possible to guarantee this, then API can be 'added' to
backport the feature or the fix from TRUNK (pre 2.0) to 1.0.

For example if tny_folder_store_get_folders has a bug that cannot be
fixed without first fixing API, then a tny_folder_store_get_folders_20
can be added to 1.0's branch. Meaning that for example 1.1 will have the
new API available for application developers.

In TRUNK would tny_folder_store_get_folders itself be fixed, with the
API change and possibly the ABI break.

In 'time', the plan for this is "very nearby". 

A large amount of patches have been committed to 1.0 this and last
month, we are and have been testing those patches during the last few
weeks.

I think we are finished testing them and are therefore ready for our
first real release.

There are at least two teams that I know of that are building an E-mail
client using TRUNK, and with you guys at Intel that number becomes
three. 

As maintainer I'd like to have consensus from all the teams working with
the Tinymail API on when we will do the 1.0 release. So far the
consensus with the other two teams is that "we can release 1.0 pretty
soon".

Your team for example found a bug in the regular expression of
TnyFolderStoreQuery last week. Depending on how critical this is for
Intel's purposes, and in negotiation with you guys, I might delay the
release until after this one is fixed.

The observer issue is also such a bug.

For the other people:

http://www.tinymail.org/trac/tinymail/ticket/83
http://www.tinymail.org/trac/tinymail/ticket/84


> In addition, the libtinymail-test can’t passed the compiling now, if
> no body care that, I could submit a patch for itJ

That would be awesome!

Making the unit tests work again has been my personal reason to delay
the release.


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Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
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