From: William S F. <ws...@fu...> - 2006-02-02 22:06:36
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David Beazley wrote: > Although I've been rather preoccupied lately, I've been noticing a lot > of compatibility problems/failure reports on the mailing list. > > Given the number of apparent changes, do you think it would make sense > to bump the version number of the next release to something like > SWIG-1.4 as a way to reduce some of the confusion with people who are > expecting it to work in exactly the same way as earlier 1.3.x > releases? Just a thought. > I'm not really sure what the answer is to be honest. I think we try to be compatible with each release. However, inevitably each release has some tiny incompatibility, so if we were to follow Dave's logic, we'd be releasing 1.6, then 1.8, then 2.0 etc instead of 1.3.27, 1.3.28, 1.3.29. I don't see it being possible to change the small incompatibilities that are introduced for the foreseeable future. If we were to stop releasing on 1.3.x, then we'd have to call the 1.3.x branch stable and continue developing on 1.4. What happens then, do we continue to make further 1.3.x releases? If so what sort of bugs do we fix? Or do we just abandon development on that version like we did with 1.1? Maintaining two versions will be burdensome, so it depends on whether we want to do that. Which version will all the linux distributions use then? We could label versions as stable more often then continue working on a development release, but then users upgrading will involve the same if not more pain that occurs now. I'm wondering if we should just keep releasing 1.3.x as we are now, that way we will be forced to make the releases as backwards compatible as possible? William |