Re: test release: 5.9.0.4-test (will be 5.9.1)

On Sun 24 May 2026, at 08:41, Ray Andrews wrote:
> Just asking, what's the strategy having to two development threads? I'd
> expect that the focus would be on the cutting edge. Not that one might
> not have a more conservative 'stable release' too I suppose, still I'd
> like to hear what you'd have to say about it.

zsh has never really had a strategy for it, at least not since i've been
involved. the general expectation has been that all development happens
linearly in master. in the unusual event that a stability update has
been needed after master moved on, it's been kind of an ad-hoc process
to put it together

most software projects don't work that way. usually they actively
maintain at least one stable branch in addition to their master/dev
branch so that unfinished/untested changes in master don't interfere
with releasing updates. if the last stable version has a major bug or
security issue, or there's a compatibility issue related to the build
that causes problems for packagers, etc, you want to be able to release
fixes for those without having to wait for master to become ready

in this case we decided to release a 5.9.1 just because it's been so
long since 5.9, packagers are having to back-port a lot of patches
themselves to keep zsh working well on newer systems, and people are
starting to wonder what's going on. 5.10 is going to take a little while
longer as questions surrounding the 'api' of one of its new features are
resolved. hopefully this will help until then

i think we're going to standardise the process for maintaining stability
releases now so hopefully this will be a little easier going forward,
though tbh the main issue is the extra work it creates for the release
manager. (i'm not even officially the rm any more, i just had some spare
time/energy to do this)

dana