[Cuis] About stable and unstable Cuis releases (was Re: Problem saving new package)

[Phil (list)]

Juan,

On Oct 1, 2013, at 7:57 AM, Juan Vuletich wrote:

> Hi Phil,
> 
> On 9/30/2013 10:41 PM, Phil (list) wrote:
>> 
>> 1836 does not have this issue.  That's what I get for going with stable :-)
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Phil
> 
> This kind of issues would be better handling by maintaining 2 branches at the same time (like, a Cuis 4.2 branch that only get bug fixes and a 4.3 alpha branch with deeper/riskier changes, and those breaking compatibility). But Cuis is too small (in users, developers, and resources) to afford to do that. Apologies.
> 

Not a problem... I'd rather have the priority be putting all effort in the dev branch to get to the next stable than duplicating effort by backporting bug fixes.  In the future I just need to remember to check any bugs against the latest dev version and make sure I report the bug in stable as fixed in dev so everyone knows that there is an outstanding issue.

> On the other hand, we are not doing deep or risky changes, and usually the very latest version is as reliable as any other. (A simpler system is less risky to change) So, the only reason I see to stay with the stable release, would be if you plan to do a development of significant size, and you need the system APIs to be really frozen.
> 

That's exactly why I started with stable: I want reasonably fixed APIs.  I've got a medium-ish sized code base that I'd prefer to not migrate more than about every 12 months or so.  The last time I migrated it was for 4.0 so it's time.  The good news is that since Cuis has already taken out most of the cruft, any breakage is usually not that big of a deal to fix (i.e. my question about ellipse drawing not too long ago, for example).  I just didn't think to check against dev when I ran into this issue mainly because I saw all the discussion re: dependency work and thought something might have changed that I just wasn't aware of.

> BTW, if anybody is doing that, maybe you also have a few hours you could donate to the project from time to time, and we could join efforts to actually start publishing bug fixes for stable releases.
> 
> Cheers,
> Juan Vuletich

Thanks,
Phil