Re: Thinking about the next stable release

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 22/05/2022 à 14:39, Jonas Hahnfeld via Discussions on LilyPond 
development a écrit :
> Hi all,
>
> with the unstable releases switched over to Guile 2.2, I think it might
> be a good idea to think about the next stable release. The last time,
> for 2.22.0 in early 2021, we kind of coincidentally aligned with the
> Debian freeze timeline for Bullseye. For the next release, Debian 12
> "Bookworm", the preliminary freeze plan can be found here:
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2022/03/msg00006.html
>
> I'm not super familiar with Debian's freeze policies, so I'm CCing
> Anthony Fok, the LilyPond maintainer in Debian. I would *guess* that a
> potential LilyPond 2.24.0 would need to land in Debian before the Soft
> Freeze, targeted for 2023-02-12? In any case, having a release ready
> towards the end of this year would be the safer bet.
>
> The reason I'm explicitly looking at Debian is that they currently
> bundle Guile 1.8 in their package, which also serves as the basis for
> Ubuntu's package. I'm sure they would be more than happy to get rid of
> that 😉 The same holds of course for other distributions as well; the
> guile1.8 package in Arch Linux is currently only required by lilypond,
> and Fedora already ships an unstable release built with Guile 2.2.
>
> So, what do people think: Would targeting a release towards the end of
> this year be a reasonable thing?



I don't have very specific opinions on dates, but I think sooner
is better than later in order to make everyone converge on
Guile 2. Also, I've seen people complaining about the lack of
macOS 64-bit versions because they had only looked at the
page for the stable release. Given that everybody on (not old)
macOS must use either an unstable version or MacPorts/Homebrew,
it would be nice to have a stable and official version working
there, to simplify the lives of macOS users who don't know what
MacPorts or even a terminal is.

So, yes, sounds sensible to me.



> If yes, there was some discussion in the past to make the release after
> that a new major version to enable bigger changes, such as potentially
> switching to Cairo. This would probably require removing some things,
> such as the \postscript command, that we should properly deprecate one
> stable release in advance... So the choices are:
>
> 0) Too early for a stable release, ok to miss the next Debian version.
> 1) Target a release towards the end of this year, but do not deprecate
> things in anticipation of a new major version after; instead go for a
> "regular" 2.26.0 afterwards.
> 2) Target a release towards the end of this year and deprecate things
> that we want to remove in LilyPond 3.0 (the details should be discussed
> in a separate thread, I think)



My understanding is that the compatibility problem with Cairo
is no longer there since

commit 5134b95188f494563f0ac5f630015cdf1f8218a9
Author: Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwenn@gmail.com>
Date:   Wed Nov 17 23:03:52 2021 +0100

    cairo: support embedded postscript



Best,
Jean