Hi Colin, At 2024-07-04T08:56:01+0100, Colin Watson wrote: > What are the plans for a 1.24 release?
I muttered some thoughts a few months ago. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-02/msg00054.html > In general I think it's bad to drift into a habit of allowing too much > time and too many commits to pass between releases; That's true, and I still like the idea of getting 1.24 out this calendar year, 1.25 in 2025, and so forth... > it makes it more difficult to work out what went wrong when users > report regressions, Yes, Git bisections of the formatter itself get tedious even with a modest growth rate of O(log n). ;-) > and it invites a "just one more fix" mindset which tends to be > never-ending until the complaints pile up high enough. I may suffer from this mindset regardless of time elapsed since release. :-O There is a 1.24 release goals Savannah ticket. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65099 I should probably file a few tickets to add to it: 1. [troff] next-generation alignment/adjustment control See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-06/msg00053.html and follow-ups. 2a. Drop cp1047.tmac, de-document it, and NEWS its withdrawal. See: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-03/msg00113.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-04/msg00000.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-05/msg00028.html 2b. [troff] emit special diagnostic on first occurrence of input character code > 127 This would tell people that EBCDIC support is gone, that they need to load one of the specialized macro files for character encoding support, and that those will be going away too in groff 1.25 in favor of support for UTF-8 input, so they need to look into preconv(1). In my opinion we need something like this since the semantics of input code points > 127 will change from groff 1.23 to 1.25. People/distributors skipping over 1.24 won't get warning, unfortunately. Unless they do something crazy like read the release notes. None of these are difficult or time-consuming, and the first is already partially done, including the hardest part (separating alignment from adjustment data inside the formatter). I've been waiting to see if any protests were lodged. I'll shoot Bertrand an email and see if he's amenable to conducting another release. Regards, Branden
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