release methodology

[John Belmonte <jvb@...>]

A request to the Lua authors: please give some attention to your release 
methodology.  I don't have any ideal in mind, but suggest you take a 
look at how things are done with popular projects that have survived 
many years of growing pains such as gcc, Python, and Mozilla.

The main gripe I have is with release naming (including both "official" 
and "work" releases, as you call them).  For example recently an update 
to 4.0 was made, called "4.0-update".  What will happen if there needs 
to be an update to the update?  This also causes problems for downstream 
packagers, as evident by the version on Daniel's Debian package:

    lua40 (4.0-5) unstable; urgency=medium

      * Applied the Lua 4.0 official patchset
      * ...

When I see this I know something is wrong immediately, because the 
number after the dash is supposed to represent the patch level for 
converting the upstream package into Debian-land.  Any changes by the 
upstream authors should be represented in the number before the dash. 
(Perhaps Daniel should have versioned it as "4.0update-1", but my 
intended point is that you should have given the new release a name such 
as 4.0.1.)

Another release naming problem is the arbitrary jump in calling 
development releases 4.1work and then 5.0work.  Deciding that the next 
official release would be 5.0 was not a good reason to change the naming 
in this work series.  It has only created confusion, and made it harder 
to search the archive for development since 4.0.

Regards,
-John



--
OpenPGP encrypted mail welcome.