[asdf-devel] 3.0.2.21

[Faré]

Dear Pascal,

all releases are considered stable, and they are recognizable because
their version has only three numbers MAJOR.MINOR.RELEASE.
(Back in ASDF 2 days, it was just two numbers 2.RELEASE.)
If you see a version with four numbers MAJOR.MINOR.RELEASE.PATCH
then it's not a release, and not considered "stable".
(Back in ASDF 2 days, that would have been three numbers 2.RELEASE.PATCH.)

Certainly, even in "stable" code, some new features may not be perfect yet.
That's called a bug, we've had plenty in the past, and we take bug
reports seriously.
But at least, before we make a release, we run our regression test suite on
a wide variety of different implementations and operating systems, and we're
pretty confident that nothing obvious was broken that used to work.

So, if you want stability, get what your implementation (or quicklisp) provides,
and only upgrade from a release tarball or a git checkout of the release branch.
If you need the latest feature or bug fix, at the price of higher risk
of breakage,
use git checkout of the master branch, and please report bugs.

ASDF is not different from a lot of other software in this regard, and certainly
gets more release effort, with a more formal process and extensive test suite
than about every single the Common Lisp library I've looked at.

PS: before a 3.1 release, we ought to do check results of cl-test-grid.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
It's just a pissing contest, but unfortunately the contestants never seem to
run out of piss.  — John McCarthy


On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Pascal Costanza <pc at p-cos.net> wrote:
> Could you please distinguish between stable and unstable releases. It's fine to ask the CL community to help with finding and fixing bugs, but there are situations where this can be a real showstopper, especially when working against deadlines. You have been very aggressive in the past at pushing out buggy versions of ASDF into compilers and quicklisp, and this can create real headaches. I think these versions should only get stable releases, and people interested in bleeding edge features can then ask for the unstable releases explicitly.