Re: Need for 0.83 as stable version

On 2009-06-06, Frediano Ziglio <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Yes, mainly I prefer the "release early and often" but I understand the point.
> However I think nobody can expect a stable release to be "monolithic"
> and unchangable. Every software have problems and bugs so it needs
> minor and maintenance release. We keep post release patches but it
> seems that these patch releases are not accepted as the stable one.

Post-release patches are quite a lot of extra work for OS packagers
to integrate; it's much easier if we can produce a package directly
from a single source code distribution.

freetds-patched.tgz is part-way there, but it has some problems.
It's a moving target which, as an OS packager, is hard to work with;
it would be much easier to work with a file that either has a date
in the filename, or a new minor release, or has some kind of version
like '0.82pl1'. It's still possible - I'm (slowly) working on an
update for the OpenBSD port and for now I just mirrored and renamed
freetds-patched from a particular date, but to have proper released
code to point at would be preferable. 

The other problem with the patches that I think may discourage
people from using them is that they aren't very visible on the
website; users either have to go to Nightly Test Results, or find
their way to /pub/Linux/ALPHA/freetds/stable to find -patched.
I think it's likely that making minor or pl releases and linking
them from "stable release" on freetds.org would help here.

There's my 0.02 GBP, anyway, do with it as you will :-)
And, of course, thanks very much for the code.