Discussions among XBoard and WinBoard developers ()

Arun Persaud | 18 Jan 2010 23:32

new developer release

Hi

I put some new tar balls on the ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/xboard/. To test
please unpack the tar-ball and run ./configure followed by make.

Would be great if we could get some feedback if things work or not ;)
Especially for v4.4.3.20100118 since we then could release that one as
4.4.3 and also for master-20100118, which has quite a lot of
restructuring of the source code and several new features in it.

cheers
     ARUN

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h.g. muller | 19 Jan 2010 10:13

Re: new developer release

One question:

why do we call the release from master a "developer release"?
Will we ever do "version releases" from this branch? It is the
development branch, after all, so any release is bound to be
a developer release, until we are ready to call it 4.5.0.

For the v4.4.x branch we clearly make the destinction, so
a "developer release" will be considered inferior to the release
of a new version, whch will deter people from using it. E.g.
it might not go into Debian. It should be more clear to people
if they can expect the release of a "more final" version from
master, or if "this is it".

Now I guess that in this particular case what we have in both
branches actually does fall short of the mark for a "version
release": The tar ball has parser.c in the winboard directory,
while the gcc and ms Makefiles do look for it in the XBoard
directory, so it will not build unless you have flex installed.
On the other hand, this means the release is probably not
broken for compiling with the IDE of the Windows compiler.

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Arun Persaud | 19 Jan 2010 21:09

Re: new developer release

Hi

> why do we call the release from master a "developer release"?
> Will we ever do "version releases" from this branch? It is the
> development branch, after all, so any release is bound to be
> a developer release, until we are ready to call it 4.5.0.

well, so the name of developer release sounds appropriate :) I think
everything that isn't stable, e.g. the latest official version should be
called developer release as far as making a final release from master, I
say it depends on how much testers we get for the new features on master
and on how fast we can get the gtk-branch to catch up with master...

> For the v4.4.x branch we clearly make the destinction, so
> a "developer release" will be considered inferior to the release
> of a new version, whch will deter people from using it. E.g.
> it might not go into Debian. It should be more clear to people
> if they can expect the release of a "more final" version from
> master, or if "this is it".

hmm, so how would you call the releases?

> Now I guess that in this particular case what we have in both
> branches actually does fall short of the mark for a "version
> release": The tar ball has parser.c in the winboard directory,
> while the gcc and ms Makefiles do look for it in the XBoard
> directory, so it will not build unless you have flex installed.
> On the other hand, this means the release is probably not
> broken for compiling with the IDE of the Windows compiler.

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