[alsa-devel] ALSA release cycle

[Takashi Iwai]

At Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:51:10 +0200,
David Henningsson wrote:
> 
> On 09/07/2012 01:58 PM, Daniel Mack wrote:
> > On 07.09.2012 13:38, David Henningsson wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> At Plumber's we discussed the ALSA release cycle. Our releases recently
> >> have been irregular, and the reasoning behind why a release was done at
> >> that time, has not been very obvious.
> >>
> >> IIRC, we kind of leaned towards releasing every six months. I don't
> >> remember if there was any consensus about whether to try to align this
> >> cycle to something else (e g Gnome, KDE, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc), or not.
> >
> > ... or the kernel? At least for the kernel parts of ALSA, syncing an
> > ALSA version to kernel version would automatically tell us which patches
> > will make it into a new release. Plus, it would also be easier to
> > compare feature sets (something like "ALSA 1.0.26 gives us what we have
> > in kernel 3.6").
> >
> > Would that be feasible or am I missing something?
> 
> I took that up as an alternative. I think more people leaned towards six 
> month cycles, but it's still an open question.
> 
> To me, I also think aligning releases to the kernel makes sense, but 
> it'll also mean a lot of releases with little change in, so maybe six 
> month cycles are better for that reason.

Well, releasing alsa-driver package for each kernel release makes some
sense.  People can use it like compat-wireless stuff.  In that way,
distros can provide the update module package even on distro kernels
from a released tarball.

For the rest, we don't have to bind the release version among all
components any longer.  The things became already stable, and we've
seen already version skips in packages like alsa-oss.


Takashi