Four! was Re: Two major releases per year instead of three

[Tony Mechelynck]

On 05/08/11 01:13, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
> Lester Caine wrote, On 08/05/2011 12:32 AM:
>> Mads Kiilerich wrote:
>>> The lack of stable API (as used by extensions and TortoiseHg) do however
>>> mean that it isn't a good idea to push new Mercurial releases
>>> (especially not major releases) as updates to released stable OS
>>> releases. It might thus be an advantage that the major release has
>>> stabilized even more in minor releases and extensions have caught up.
>>
>> This is certainly what caught many of us out? 1.9 was pushed out as an
>> update in the SUSE repos without the correct supporting updates.
>
> It is quite common - and easy - to install Mercurial extensions
> manually, so I doubt any amount of supporting updates would have made
> the update to Mercurial 1.9 "safe" from an OS stability point of view.
>
>> Had I actually spotted it buried in a wodge of security updates I
>> might not have loaded it, but without the correct 'protection' to
>> ensure that a previously working build required the extra packages
>> there is little guarantee that things will remain working? While the
>> work of who ever pushed the update to the repo is welcome, it does
>> need to be done with a little more understanding of what will happen?
>
> Pushed the update to which repo?
>
> Pushed to Mercurials repo? The Mercurial repo has a very clear policy
> that internal APIs can be changed at any time - even though it shouldn't
> happen in minor releases. The API changes for 1.9 were thus ok and
> followed the rules - and 2.0 might have a similar amount of API changes.
>
> Pushed to the SUSE update repo? Yes, pushing an update to Mercurial 1.9
> as a bugfix in a stable release was thus perhaps not a good idea.
>
> /Mads

I don't know about the openSUSE "factory" repo, which is a 
"bleeding-edge development" repo, or about the milestone repos for the 
next not-yet-released openSUSE distro (openSUSE 12.1, public release 
foreseen 2011-11-11); but the latest Mercurial release in the current 
openSUSE "stable" repos (openSUSE 11.4 including Update and even 
Update-Test repos; but the latter two include nothing for Mercurial) is 
Mercurial 1.7.5. I'm not perfectly happy with such an "old" version of 
Mercurial being what I get from my distro, but that's what I have to use 
if I want to keep the YaST package manager happy.

Or do you (Lester) mean SuSE Professional is distributing an "unsafe and 
insufficiently tested" Mercurial version compared to openSUSE? That 
would be unusual.


Best regards,
Tony.
-- 
He's the kind of guy, that, well, if you were ever in a jam he'd be
there ... with two slices of bread and some chunky peanut butter.