Re: Next release from master

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> master should become emacs-26 at some point in the future, once it's ready,
>> while emacs-25 should only continue to improve and stabilize the 25.x
>> series.

> Are you changing your mind? ;-) You told me something different in
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-11/msg01372.html.

Yes, I suppose I am.

'master' should be a place where people can commit API-breaking changes once
they are ready for general consumption; otherwise, such changes would have to
live in feature branches for a very long time, and we'd have little ability to
test them in combination.

However, changes of that magnitude shouldn't happen between 25.1 and 25.2;
that's not what a minor release means to me. When things really start
changing, we should think of them as going into the next major release.

Therefore, the emacs-25 branch will stabilize over time until there's nothing
more to do there. Although many will abandon the branch altogether in favor of
master at some point, there might still be some who wish to fix bugs there and
call for a point release.

I imagine this will lead to more frequent major releases, and fewer point
releases, but that really depends on what we're doing. The more bug work we
do, the more point releases; the more feature work, the more major releases.

I'm not sure that I'm calling for anything radically different than what has
happened before, though.  Are you saying that in the past, what is now master
would become 25.2? What then of features that are destined for 26 and not
future versions of 25.x?

> You seem to be talking about something that never happened before in Emacs:
> we never left any branch "for maintenance", we left it for good. Once the
> decision was made that the next release will be from master, the branch was
> abandoned, and never revisited except in emergency (e.g., if some
> super-critical bug was reported in the last release that required an urgent
> fix).

Yes, I may be talking about something that never happened before in Emacs, but
it's been valuable on other projects, so I thought we might try it here as
well.

That said, if a shift to master means no one ever fixes another bug on
emacs-25, then there will be effectively no change; but the branch can still
hang around for a while, and be available for point releases if necessary.

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2

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