discipline in releases

[Mark Galassi <rosalia at lanl dot gov>]

Amigos,

A new version of guppi was released today.  Guppi is a plotting
program which aims to become a CORBA plotting component for GNOME.

Guppi uses Scheme and links to libguile.

I went to build it and found that its configure script fails because
it wants guile-1.3.4 instead of guile-1.3 (which is what ships on Red
Hat 6.1).  rawhide.redhat.com does not have a package for guile-1.3.4
either.

So I went and asked Jon Trowbridge why he could not just use 1.3, and
he pointed out (message below) that 1.3.4 is not just a bug-fix
release, but it also has important new features.

I suggest that when we make releases with real differences and API
additions in them, we call them 1.4 (or 1.(n+1) in general).  If they
are pure bugfix releases, we call them 1.3.4 (1.3.(k+1)).

I suspect that if the current version were called 1.4, there would be
new official packages out for it.

----------
>> Mark
> If 1.3.4 has new and necessary features in its API (beyond being a
> bugfix release), I could bring it up on the Guile list and a 1.4
> release should be put out.

> Jon
This is the case.  Guile 1.3.0 doesn't have the
scm_strport_to_string() function, requiring you to poke around inside
of strport structs and do stuff in an way that made big assumptions
about implementation details.

Between 1.3.0 and 1.3.4 the implementation changed, and this
(much needed) function was added to the API.  Rather than get into a
bunch of #ifdef-ing, I decided to just require 1.3.4.