[Debian-olpc-devel] sugar-0.84_0.84.6-1_amd64.changes is NEW

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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Hi Luke and other fellow Sugar package maintainers,

(please do not cc me - I am subscribed to the list, and private copies 
mess up my mail routines slightly)

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 07:57:08PM -0400, Luke Faraone wrote:

>Are we going to be supporting the 0.82 branch in Unstable for the 
>considerable future, or is there some other reason to name the new 
>package differently?

No, I no longer believe that it makes sense to keep 0.82: Upstream 
clearly has lost interest in maintaining it, and we clearly do not have 
the (skilled!) manpower to do so.  Also, the only strong reason for 
maintaining 0.82 was to support deployments still using that and unable 
to easily upgrade (read: XOs), but our 0.82 is not identical to theirs 
(e.g. we have a newer xulrunner, and generally Debian/Ubuntu libraries 
are not identical to Fedora ones) so we cannot reliably support them 
anyway.

But anyway, even if/when dropping support for the 0.82 branch, upstream 
will continue to switch between stable and unstable branches, and we 
will provide both newest unstable and newest stable (and possibly also 
older stable) concurrently.

These are the git branches currently used in each Git:

master: newest packaging branch

master-0.84: newest stable branch (forked off when upstream fork too)

master-0.82: older stable branch (forked if needed for security updates)

upstream-repo: upstream master branch (not really needed)

upstream: our mixture of upstream (upstream Git merged with tarballs)

upstream-0.84: same as upstream, when upstream forks off 0.84 branch


When upstream forks 0.84 branch and starts developing 0.85, we start 
releasing packages in the 0.86 branch.  So that when upstream actually 
release 0.86.0, we do not need to wait for ftp-master to approve a whole 
chain of new source and binary package names.

I have done this with sugar-toolkit already: There is currently released 
a sugar-toolkit-0.86 package, version 0.85~0.84.2-1 - which means it is 
a snapshot release from the 0.85 branch, with latest tag being 0.84.2.

That last part of the version number is not very important - the crucial 
part is to use "~" to keep snapshots "below zero", to make room for 
whatever gets released later on.

If upstream later decides to release next stable release as e.g. 1.0, 
then we rebranch and drop the wrongly predicted future-even-number 
series.  That creates some noise for ftp-master, but hopefully upstream 
will decide on next even number already when they start working on the 
prior uneven development branch, so we avoid such hassle.


Hope that makes some sense.


Kind regards,

  - Jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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