Re: groff maintainership, release, and blockers

[Bertrand Garrigues]

Hi Ingo, Hi Branden,

On Fri, Aug 26 2022 at 02:04:57 PM, "G. Branden Robinson" 
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> At 2022-08-26T13:51:25+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
>> Also, my best wishes for Bertrands further and speedy recovery!
> He has mine as well!

Thanks for your kind words,

> Bertrand is going to manage this release as it will apparently take
> literally months to get me through FSF processes.  In the meantime, he's
> hit a smaller process obstacle himself, so at present _he_ can't do a
> release candidate either.  We expect this to be resolved "soon".

I had a technical issue, but the GNU admin reacted very quickly and I
should now be able to upload tarballs.

>> Wouldn't it be better to simply abandon the the GNU roff project
>> (i.e. leaving the FSF with no developer whatsoever), fork groff under
>> a new name (say, "GPL roff"), and continue that new project outside
>> the FSF?

Thanks to the GNU project I've discovered a lot of great pieces of code,
and also what's freely sharing code between contributors, so I can only
be against such moves.

>> > But for the sake of transparency, in the meantime, he asked if the
>> > current HEAD was good enough to tag as "rc2" and I said "yes".
>>
>> Sorry, i fail to understand that.  The acronym "RC" stands for "release
>> candidate".  I would define a "release candidate" as "a version that
>> is believed to be ready for release".
[...]
>> In particular, i'm firmly convinced that issuing an RC while even one
>> single blocker issue is unresolved is a blatant contradiction.  Before
>> an RC, all blockers must either be resolved or explicitly
>> re-classified as "not release critical" and re-scheduled for the
>> subsequent release.

I understand your point Ingo, however the rc1 tag is almost 2 years old,
so I feel we need to make a new tag now, and from this tag decide which
bugs must absolutely be fixed.  I won't release any official 1.23.0 if
you consider there is a blocker or that the mandoc is not in a good
shape.

For sure there will be some bug fixes after rc2 and we'll have an rc3,
so it's perhaps not exactly a "Release Candidate", it's a kind of
"intermediate tag" or an "alpha release", but I'll still name it rc2,
for the sake of simplicity.

> Well, then, in a sense we don't have _any_ blockers, because "the tree
> isn't red".

Yes at least the 'make check' does not fail.  If I recall correctly at
some point between two 1.22.4.x RC, I had no pdf example generated at
all, only empty files; this is the kind of state where I consider groff
to be broken.

> But according to Savannah, we have 7 blocker issues right now.
[...]

Ingo,

Could you please detail here what is your list of blockers that you
think must be absolutely fixed before the official 1.23.0 release?

Thanks a lot,

Regards,

Bertrand