Releases & semver

[carlossless]

The README currently states:

Q2PRO doesn't have releases. It is always recommended to use the git master version.

Would you consider changing your stance on this and adopting some release pattern like semver? This would make packaging and distributing q2pro a bit easier.

Furthermore, should the r{xxxx} tags (like r3510) be treated as some form of stable releases?

[skullernet]

Releases only make sense if actively supported and maintained. E.g. security fixes are backported, bug reports for these versions are accepted and analyzed, etc. I don't have resources to do that. For this reason only git master version is supported and there are no releases.

Furthermore, should the r{xxxx} tags (like r3510) be treated as some form of stable releases?

I don't think so. These are just random snapshots I make before making some potentially breaking changes to make regression testing easier.

[carlossless]

Thanks for answering this!

Releases only make sense if actively supported and maintained. E.g. security fixes are backported, bug reports for these versions are accepted and analyzed

True although, I guess a more minimal approach would be to use it only to signal new features, breaking changes, and bug fixes/patches, without supporting previous versions and backporting fixes to them.

Regardless, I would still like to know if there is any guidance on how to pick the latest stable commit for distribution, or would that always be any recent commit in master?

[skullernet]

I guess a more minimal approach would be to use it only to signal new features, breaking changes, and bug fixes/patches, without supporting previous versions and backporting fixes to them.

But that still requires maintaining some kind of changelog, making "releases", etc. For me this seems redundant since you can just take the latest commit and use git history.

I would still like to know if there is any guidance on how to pick the latest stable commit for distribution, or would that always be any recent commit in master?

If this is some kind of rolling release distribution than any recent commit will do I guess. If this is some distribution with fixed release schedule then it's probably better to not package Q2PRO at all rather than providing some outdated snapshot for years.

[carlossless]

If this is some kind of rolling release distribution than any recent commit will do I guess. If this is some distribution with fixed release schedule then it's probably better to not package Q2PRO at all rather than providing some outdated snapshot for years.

While I think that addressing this topic might be helpful for people wanting to package q2pro up anywhere, I am personally interested in having it packaged in NixOS/nixpkgs - NixOS/nixpkgs#286460

The unstable branch/channel could be updated frequently (but I don't see this happening more often than every couple of months), while stable releases happen every 6 months, and only one stable release is ever supported.