Re: Latest and quarterly best practices

On Fri, Jan 12, 2024 at 09:51:06AM -0800, Jose Quinteiro wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
The quarterly branches are just that, branches of main at the beginning
of a quarter, so such ports would have to be manually removed for each
branch.

Regards,
René

> Thanks,
> Jose