1.4 release series

[Olly Betts]

On Wed, Nov 04, 2015 at 04:17:03PM -0600, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> In Ubuntu, we have python3-xapian1.3 as a convenience package for
> folks who want to start the porting effort of their own applications

Hmm, I'm not wild about the package descriptions:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/wily/xapian1.3-bindings

"Xapian search engine interface for Python" and "Xapian search engine
interface for Python3" don't make it clear that these are packages of an
upstream development snapshot, with an API which might change without
notice.

I'm not clear why the Python 2 bindings from 1.3 have been packaged as
well as the Python 3 bindings - that just seems to add to the potential
confusion, as there people could easily just see "1.3 > 1.2" and think
this is a newer release, and so a better option to be using.

Also not happy to see myself listed as the "Original Maintainer" - these
packages are really nothing to do with me.

Please can you at least improve those descriptions?

> Do you think it's realistic to expect a new Xapian release with Python 3
> support in Debian say in the next month or so?

We should have a new development snapshot in that timeframe, but at the
current rate of progress I can't realistically see 1.4.0 being out that
soon.

If anyone is keen to see a release sooner, there are certainly ways to
help with that.  The most obvious is to look at tickets currently marked
with one of the "1.3.*" milestones and see whether they can be bumped to
a later version, really need to be addressed before 1.4.0, or if there's
a way to achieve a partial win with a small amount of work.

Cheers,
    Olly