Re: Next release

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

On Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:50:27 +0100
Frank Terbeck <ft@bewatermyfriend.org> wrote:
> I don't know if that's still something people want. But I thought I'd bring
> it up again anyway. FWIW, the FVWM folks were planning a similar move and
> one of their developers (Thomas Adam) wrote a lengthy mail describing how
> it could work:
> 
>   <http://www.mail-archive.com/fvwm-workers@fvwm.org/msg02470.html>
> 
> They had a similar starting point as zsh has. One major development branch
> in CVS and a working git mirror in place.

I think it's generally felt moving to git would be sensible and wouldn't
be too much work, given what's already been done with the mirror.

That message seems to be mostly about branch structure which isn't
really relevant to us; our case is much simpler.  Obviously the ease of
people having their own private areas without reference to the main
repository is a big gain, but that's up to them.
 
> Thomas later followed up on himself with the following mail regarding the
> ChangeLog file:
> 
>   <http://www.mail-archive.com/fvwm-workers@fvwm.org/msg02471.html>
> 
> ...and I couldn't agree more.

I'd prefer to have the ChangeLog, at least to begin with.  I find it
much more visible; I'm planning to spend as little time as I can playing
with source control, whose job is to stay in the background while I look
at the files (and I find git infuriatingly geeky).  If we get rid of it
on a day-to-day basis, we would need to get into the habit of including
all the same information in commits --- which is a perfectly reasonable
aim, particularly when the notion of changesets becomes meaningful.
Generating it at the time of a release rather than immediately might be
something to aim at.  If we get to the point where we have a simple
utility (i.e. doesn't demand detailed knowledge of git) that can
generate a readable one, that becomes possible.

> I don't know if dropping the stable- vs development versions, is something
> that would work for zsh (although I think it could - everybody uses 4.3.x
> anyway)

We've only had separate development branches when needed for long term
work on particular features, first ZLE widgets and then multibyte
characters.  I don't think there's any call for a separate branch after
the next stable release is made --- though it would be good to get test
releases spread a bit further than at present.  I wonder if it would be
sensible to use the Sourceforge zsh-dev area for those.

> and I also don't know if there would be as much use of public topic
> branches as Thomas suggests, because that probably only makes sense when
> big features are being added. But all in all, I think he makes a lot of
> relevant points that might be transferable to zsh development as well.

Feel free to bring up anything you think is relevant --- other than the
basic move I didn't see much that seemed to affect our much simpler case
--- but obviously anything that makes administration more complicated is
out (there's no reason moving to git should generally have that effect,
though).

-- 
Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>
Web page now at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/p.w.stephenson/