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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



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