[wx-dev] [all] 2.7.0 and releases organization in general

[Mart Raudsepp]

On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 20:02 +0200, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Sat, 05 Aug 2006 19:39:29 +0300 Mart Raudsepp <leio at dustbite.net> wrote:
> 
> MR> This is a stable release announcement. Something similar to 2.5.0
> MR> release announcement would be probably better, with some even more added
> MR> warnings on future API changes, perhaps citing some far reaching work
> MR> that has yet to be done.
> 
>  My version is in the cvs (docs/publicity/announcement.txt) now, please
> comment on it.

In my opinion it doesn't convey the problem of using the version in
production yet very well. 
How about something like that as another chapter, replacement chapter;
or pieces of the following might be otherwise useful:

"This is a technology preview release out of a series of many towards
the way of a stable more feature-rich 2.8 production release. There are
no API nor ABI compatibility assurances for the 2.7.0 release compared
to the 2.6 series or the upcoming releases in the development cycle.
However, we'd like you to test it out and let us know of problems and
wishes through our bugs and feature request trackers. We do not advise
to use this version of the framework in production."

We seem to treat the terms "framework" and "toolkit" interchangeably at
some places. I'm not sure if this won't cause any confusion. I think we
should try to stick to the framework term? The title is for example
saying it's a toolkit, for example.

We might want to find more new stuff to mention in the release
announcement, but only if it's significant. The time span from branching
has been long, so the expectation is to have lots of stuff.

Sorry that I can't say much more at this point. I need some sleep before
to have better thoughts. I'd really hope to see some constructive input
from others as well.


> MR> To me it sounds like we are going for a release today or this weekend.
> MR> Did I understand that right?
> 
>  I still don't know but the fact is that right now DEB and RPM generation
> works and there are no (AFAIK) serious recent bugs so it seems like the
> right moment. I also have the impression that if nothing is done, nothing
> is going to happen for a long time. And I'd like to do some development on
> HEAD (potentially breaking things) and OTOH I won't have time to spend on
> packages generation again any time soon.

Did you say we will be able to grab automatically generated tarballs
(how to deal with CVS tagging then?) and dub them the release number on
them, or it's more than generating the deb and rpm's, which should not
be a pre-requirement for a release to happen? It is a development
release, only a tarball should really be necessary in my opinion. If the
2.7 user can't figure out how to compile it from the tarball, are we
sure we want him/her to use this release?
Having the .deb and .spec files work out of the box is of course very
nice, and at that point generating the binary packages not much work
given enough free time. They are often in other projects also made
available in due course... 1-3 days after the tarball release and
announcements.

>  So let's say that we do release it, unless someone objects or asks for
> another delay.
> 
>  What do you say?
> VZ

Has any testing of the HEAD code been undertaken recently? I know I just
recently did the change to not have wxAdv depend on wxHTML/wxXml, for
example. And that fixed all samples utilizing wxAdv but not wxHTML not
running without passing it an obscure LD environment variable...

Can we say nothing this bad is still in there? I haven't been following
HEAD very well recently, so I can take your word for it, but would
prefer to do some tests on wxGTK in the morning/afternoon.
However I haven't heard of any major problems in the code itself either.

Over-all, I think that if delaying the release now would mean a long
delay, and nothing bad creeps up, then we should do it.


In one of the earlier posts you were looking for a volunteer to be
responsible for the releases and organize ourselves without Julian.

There I have some unanswered questions:

* Is Julian away on a vacation kind of thing? I didn't find any
references in the mailing list.

* It was plural "releases". Does that mean more than 2.7.0 release?
Personally I wanted to push for a 2.6.4 rather soon now, potentially
looking into rolling tarballs and such on my own after getting the code
in shape. Was Julian looking for someone to pass release management on?

* Are you now going to do 2.7.0 on your own after looking for a
volunteer? I have nothing against that, unless we will have a situation
where every next release is done by someone else.

* What is required to actually do the release?
For example if it's about testing, rolling tarball(s) from KevinO's
scripts, testing those, uploading them somewhere and doing
announcements, then I can probably take care of some or all of that,
given some permission bits.
I can't roll actual debs and rpm's without quite some virtual machine
setups, however. But given working .deb and .spec files others can do
that for me, or over time I can set things up.



PS: It might be a good time to announce to this list that I have
recently become the official maintainer of wxWidgets, wxPython and some
applications and libraries based on wxWidgets in Gentoo Linux.
wxWidgets configure.in/wx-config hacking awaits...
You can expect me checking ABI in stable branches and working on fixing
that symbol bloat in HEAD with gcc to actually make ABI checking more
viable with all the other bonuses (start-up time mostly). Latter of
course changes the ABI quite a lot smaller in an upcoming 2.7.x...


Regards,
Mart Raudsepp