[fpc-devel] FPC 2.6.x branched, trunk becomes 2.7.1

[Jonas Maebe]

On 05 Aug 2011, at 10:49, Alexander Klenin wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 19:39, Jonas Maebe  
> <jonas.maebe at elis.ugent.be> wrote:
>>> So, TAChart will have to carry numlib fork until 2.6.2 ?
>>
>> It's always possible. FPC releases are not based on "feature X will  
>> certainly be in it". We tried that (we were not going to do the  
>> next major release before the cpstrnew branch was finished), but it  
>> just doesn't work with a pure volunteer project.
>
> I totally agree that time-based releases are the best,

Major releases are not really time-based. They're mostly "trunk has  
diverged quite significantly from the fixes branch and merging is  
getting quite hard".

> but FPC has extremely long release cycle, and this makes everybody
> desperate to "catch the train", since if you are late,
> you are stuck at current station for a year ;-)

That's why we have snapshots. The main purpose of a release is to have  
something that is stable and which doesn't break previously working  
code (except in known cases documented at http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_Trunk 
  ). A release with lots of regressions is worthless to everyone, even  
if it contains every single feature that you need. A high quality  
release missing some features may be less useful than one which  
contains everything you need, but it's much better than one which  
breaks stuff.


Jonas