Re: groff maintainership, release, and blockers

[Sam James]

> On 26 Aug 2022, at 22:53, Bertrand Garrigues via <groff@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> 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,
> 

Yes, computers can always wait :)

>> 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.

Yes - you can call it whatever you like and I'll test
it on the various platforms available to Gentoo if it's posted
to the platform-testers list (please do this if you want wider
attention)! Don't fret over the name.

It can be an alpha, beta, rc, whatever.

best,
sam

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