Re: steady development

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Dima,

In your messages, there are several topics, which I'll reply to separately.
Focusing on one topic means to simplify the discussion.

> regular releases are badly needed.

You make it sound like releases are so much better than steady development.
But releases are not ideal: When there is an issue,
  1. users or developers need to find a workaround,
  2. once there is a release that fixes the issue, the users need to
     revert the workaround and use the official feature instead.

With steady development, you get and can install a fix within days. For example,
just last week, Emacs wanted a different behaviour of gen_tempname() and got it
within days.

This matters especially for gnulib, because gnulib is used by package authors
_before_ they create their tarballs. If gnulib were rolled out as releases, the
time delay until a fix reaches the users would be
  - the time from the fix until the next gnulib release
PLUS
  - the time from that point to the next release of the particular package.
PLUS
  - the time it takes for your favorite distro to upgrade to that release.

> As well, talking about "taking QA steps" does not inspire much confidence.
> Stable, well-used, versions have obvious advantages.

The QA steps I talked about were unit tests and continuous integration.

I don't know about you, but I do trust
  a package with unit tests and a CI that verifies that the tests pass
more than
  a package with releases but no unit tests
or
  a package which does releases at dates that were fixed in advance.

Bruno