I finally took time to setup a forge and some old drafts turned up. I am publishing one of them today as is even though it’s 4 years old (2018-08-07T13:27:43+01:00). I’m not as grumpy as I was at the time but I still think this applies.
Today I am grumpy at people’s expectation of a free software project, about versioning and releases. I am mostly concerned about applications rather than libraries in this article but I am sure some of this would apply to libraries as well.
Today we were discussing about versioning and releases in the poezio chatroom.
Poezio is a console application, a small project maintained by a handful of contributors to which I am grateful. I also have a few contributions myself. The application is far from perfect but what software is anyway.
The last release – as of writing – for the project is 0.11, published on
Jan 31, 2017. A bit over 1.5 years ago. Yes, the project is still being
actively maintained, but no release is being made for the moment.
No, not every project releases with the same regularity. No, not every project has the same understanding of what a release is. Most projects don’t have the same constraints.
For some projects releases are sacred and I am happy for them. Maintained for X months or even years to which will only be applied security fixes or critical bug fixes (crashes and the like).
For others, releases are only checkpoints. A way of saying that features are being added, bugs are being fixed, and have people talk about it.
There is no global definition of what a release is supposed to be. It is up to project maintainers to decide what they want to see in it. They could very well make a release every other commit and be happy with it if they wanted to be silly. They would still be semver compliant – one of the various versioning scheme defined out there.
Nothing also mandates they have to backport bug fixes to the current or previous releases, and some projects actually cannot afford such a luxury. All of this takes time and that is a really expensive resource in a project.
Update from the present:
I think the issue I tried to convey in this article isn’t that we don’t have time, or that there’s no definition of a release, it’s that I’m tired of being imposed a vision of the world I don’t agree with. What’s more, people having these expectations often don’t even take part in the process of making the project or in the community around it, at any level.