Re: Latest and quarterly best practices

On 1/4/24 12:19, Jan Beich wrote:
> henrichhartzer@tuta.io writes:
> 
>> I propose that as a rule of thumb, if a package uses Semantic
>> Versioning (semver) and the changes are non-breaking, it should be
>> cherry picked into quarterly. Especially if this is only a patch level
>> change and not a minor, but likely either way.
> 
> I tend to cherry-pick everything unless there's a good reason not to.
> ABI breakage, POLA, insufficient QA, lack of user-visible changes,
> churn fatigue, different maintainer or lack of time are such reasons.
> 
> For example, backporting vulkan-* is mostly churn compared to
> backporting mesa-devel which brings actual Vulkan improvements.
> 
>> An opposite case, and this one may be truly a no harm no foul case:
>> x11-wm/hyprland was updated from 0.33.1_2 to 0.34.0, and cherrypicked
>> to quarterly. There were a number of changes in this release, and I
>> personally would be hesitant to recommend such a cherrypicking unless
>> there were known issues with 0.33.1 that users had complained
>> about. Otherwise, since it's an offline window manager, it seems like
>> waiting for the quarterly release would make the most sense. Now in
>> this case I don't know the context and cherrypicking may have made
>> complete sense -- I'm just using it as an example to try and explain
>> my thoughts.
> 
> Wayland ecosystem moves fast. Hyprland is even faster, outpacing Sway.
> 0.34.0 made it easier to use plugins, removing the need to create ports.
> 0.33.0 removed NVIDIA hacks to bundled wlroots, helping FreeBSD port.
> 
> - Before 1.0 versions have no stability guarantee
> - Upstream[1] and the Discord community don't support old releases
> - Old releases are frequently buggy
> - Backporting generic bug fixes is risky
> - I don't want to support old versions of this
> 
> [1] At least the documentation is versioned, see
>     https://wiki.hyprland.org/version-selector/
> 
Maybe there are some ports that should not exist in the quarterly
branch? Looks like some of these are under such heavy development that
they really don't have a stable version.

Thanks,
Jose