Making new releases of X.Org modules

[Thomas Zimmermann]

Hi

Am 08.12.22 um 02:37 schrieb Alan Coopersmith:
> Normally when I go through the list of modules which have had git commits
> since their last release was tagged to decide what to make new releases of,
> I skip over those which only have changes that don't really affect the
> installed files, such as the changes for migrating to gitlab, autogen
> script updates, CI updates, changing the tarball type from .bz2 to .xz, 
> etc.
> 
> This has resulted in some modules not getting released in many years.
> For instance most of the font modules were last released in 2010, but
> have an assortment of small changes we could release, like:
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/font/adobe-100dpi/-/commits/master
> but which wouldn't result in any changes I see to the installed font files.
> 
> But we keep getting bugs filed for the ancient generated autoconf scripts
> not recognizing new platforms like RISC-V, such as the 4 "BUILD FAIL" bugs
> on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/xorg/font/-/issues .
> 
> And I've had another distro packager email me recently asking to make
> new releases of various drivers, such as all the xf86-video-sun* modules.
> 
> Am I being too picky about deciding if a release is warranted?  Is it
> going to annoy other distro packagers if we make a few more releases
> than we have before?  (Maybe ship font package updates every 6 years
> instead of waiting for 12?)
> 
> Honestly, from a purely selfish point of view with my day job hat on,
> having a few more releases helps us since our policy requires reviewing
> any FOSS package that hasn't had an upstream release in the past few years
> to verify it's not dead/abandoned/etc. and it's less work for me to
> make a quick package release than it is to go through our review process.
> (Which is admittedly why there have been a number of recent releases that
>   just fix compiler & cppcheck warnings when there's nothing else to do.)
> 

Thanks for taking care of those packages. I think more regular releases 
would be a good thing. For our distros at SUSE, we generally prefer 
upstream releases over carrying patches in our repos.

Best regards
Thomas


-- 
Thomas Zimmermann
Graphics Driver Developer
SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH
Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
(HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg)
Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev
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