[josm-dev] JOSM releases

[Ulf Lamping]

Frederik Ramm schrieb:
> This has proven to be next to untenable; for any kind of serious work,
> the "release" version was generally unsuitable. 
>   
ACK. Releases needs to be done much more often - giving the pace of OSM 
development.
> On the one hand it may be worthwile to have a playground for new
> features and so on, migrating them into a proper release once they're
> stable. On the other hand, nobody really does any testing of "alpha"
> features anyway.
>   
At least nobody does it regularly :-)

That's the main thing to keep in mind. Unless you have enough developers 
to force / motivate to work on versioning, branching, ... (and we don't 
have - as most OSS projects) keep that effort to a minimum wherever 
possible - and as another consequence, automate as much as possible.
> I am unsure how we should proceed with this in the future. Should we
> aim to have a "stable" and a "latest" version? 
Yes, I think so. The "stable" version should considered to be beta 
anyway IMO. But we need to have a much more automated way to release 
such versions (including plugins - see below!).
> If yes, should we keep
> them in separate SVN branches and fix bugs in the "stable" versions as
> well, or should we consider the "stable" version an unmodifiable
> snapshot?
>   
What will happen in the end? If a bug is encountered, it will be fixed 
in the current SVN first and merging it to the "stable" branch will be 
manual labor that no one is willing to do.
> I think I am mildly in favour of an Ubuntu-like system where we set up
> a fixed release schedule (say: once a month, released on the first day
> of the month - makes version naming easy). That version would normally
> be unchanged throughout the month unless important bugs are fixed; at
> the end of each month we would normally merge all features added
> during that month, unless they are still rather unstable.
>   
As said above, this is far more manual labor than anyone is going to do IMO.

BTW: Concerning plugins: I don't think that the former "works with JOSM 
1.5" wiki page imi tried out is the way to go. A JOSM release should 
contain a snapshot of the available plugins as well, this way makes it 
much easier for users to get a set of JOSM and plugins that probably 
will work together. This versioning of plugins is currently a PITA and 
doesn't really work IMHO.

What I would like to see is to have a JOSM jar file that contains all 
plugins that were current at the time it was build (which plugins are 
enabled by default is a different question/discussion).


In the end, anything other than taking a snapshot of the current trunk 
and release that won't work IMHO.

Regards, ULFL