On 04/26/2011 05:04 AM, Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
On 04/26/2011 10:48 AM, Pavel Sanda wrote:
Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
I'd like to propose that 2.x release are only about GUI
improvements and
code cleanup. IOW 2.x should keep the file format unchanged.
How are you going to do that? No format change? This is not going to
happen.
Why not? Why should be rush in changing the file format? I think
there is a
lot that be can be done without changing the file format.
this would be showstopper for bibliography improvements and so on.
i dont see a single reason why should we stop bumping fileformat.
thats why we have stable branch.
That's also why time between releases are sooo long... 2 or 3 releases
every six without file format changes sounds very appealing to the
user that I am. To the developer, this means that his pet feature will
arrive sooner to the users.
Don't we mostly do this? There certainly have been new features in the
1.6.x series.
The file format change is _the_ reason why people are kept back with
older version of LyX. 2 or 3 years time is OK for a file format
change but 6 months is obviously not.
The problem here is that so many new features do involve file format
changes. I'd go so far as to say that *most* new features involve format
changes. Anything that changes the LaTeX output counts as such. For
example, I have a nearly complete patch that will add more complete
support for refstyle: plurals, capital or not, multiple
cross-references. Of course this means a file format change. So will
proper support for BibLaTeX, or anything else that touches the layout
format.
As an indication of this, I note that the layout format went from 11 to
35 this cycle, and the file format from 345 to 413.
What we could do is be a little more liberal in allowing new features
into branch that do not involve any format change. E.g., it would have
been possible to allow comparison and advanced find and replace into
branch, and even on-the-fly spell check, but we chose not to do so.
Obviously these sorts of things need serious testing, but they can
perhaps get it in trunk.
I would suggest that we try to release 2.1 within a year, at most. File
format changes are, in general, not any more destabilizing than anything
else, so whether there have been format changes doesn't seem to me to
make much difference to this.
Richard
