> On 18 Aug 2017, at 13:08, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote: > > Thanks Marcus - and definitely we all appreciate that its holiday season and > that a lot of this is driven by community and people donating their free time. > > I’m still a bit unclear on the moving parts. To paraphrase what you have said: > > We start each yearly cycle with a X.0 new release. Then there may be point > releases 6.1, 6.2 etc where there is a breaking change (typically a new VM I > guess - but is there anything else that would cause a .x release?). > > Then there are “hot fixes” that causes an image number change (these have > worked there way through the CI, as it triggered a new build)? The > implication is then that what I download from Pharo.org <http://pharo.org/> > is the last point release,
No, the download is always the latest (with all accepted fixes integrated). > but then I can go and find a newer image “hot fix” if I want some of the > latest more minor fixes (and I guess this then answers m .x question above - > as I guess that if there was a major bug in the image it might also trigger a > new point release so that new users would get that fix when downloading from > pharo.org <http://pharo.org/>?) > The problem is that doing a release 6.1 takes half a day of work. We could improve that, but then with Pharo7 all this changed anyway, so we will not improve this process. (and not do many releases of this kind for Pharo6). > So a reasonably active Pharo user (but not a more bleeding edge new release > user) should typically download the latest image every month to stay current? > Normally you have a CI that builds from the latest pharo image + the latest commit from your repo and you start with that all couple of days/weeks (This is important to make sure that you have a reproduce build, too). > We should encourage more seasoned users to also try a leading edge point > release, and apply the latest hot fix image particularly in the latter part > of year when we are trying to stabilise for the next release cycle. And then > there are the instructions about taking the next leap for contributing back… > > Is this right? Not really. *all* fixes that go into the stable release go into the development release, too. So the releases of stable Pharo6 have not much todo with Pharo7, no need to run a special Pharo6 when we stabilize Pharo7. Here it is important that people use Pharo7. Keep in mind that we try to do active development only in the development branch, so we talk about 20-30 fixes in total, many many are not really that important or are just important for those who ran into them. So we should not be too complex about it… it worked fine like this the last years. Marcus
