[Xapian-devel] Branching for 1.1

[Richard Boulton]

Xapian 1.0 was released a little over 9 months ago now.  We've been 
adding features and fixing bugs throughout the 1.0 release series, and 
have now got a reasonably stable and solid release with 1.0.5.  There 
are still some outstanding bugs which are fixed in SVN but aren't yet in 
any release, and more are likely to be discovered over the coming 
months, so we'll be wanting to make at least a 1.0.6 release at some 
point, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least one further release 
after that in the 1.0 series.  I don't expect that we are likely to want 
to add any major new functionality to the 1.0 series now, though.

However, since 1.0.5 we've implemented various things on HEAD which 
probably don't belong in a 1.0.X release: in particular, the replication 
code, while an API addition (and thus, technically possible to include 
in 1.0.6) is still a bit immature, and it would be good to give it a few 
months of development time to settle before freezing it into a release.

I therefore think it is time to make a branch for continued development 
of the 1.0 release series, and to dedicate HEAD to development towards 
the 1.1 release series.

The appropriate branchpoint is probably just before we started adding 
replication support.  There would then be a few further changes to apply 
to the branch from HEAD which relate to bug fixes.

I'm happy to make such a branch, but thought I'd check if other 
developers (especially Olly) agree that now is a sensible time to make 
it, or have other suggestions.

-- 
Richard