[parted-devel] State of parted development

[Otavio Salvador]

David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com> writes:

> parted-1.8.x
> ------------
> When I spoke to Leslie about the 1.x branch, it was agreed that we
> would stabilize it and continue it as necessary (i.e., as other
> projects were making use of it).  The plans for parted-2.0 are going
> to be invasive, so it will be nice to offer other projects a
> relatively up-to-date parted-1.x branch until they move over to what
> will be parted 2.0.

Good. That will be nice.

Maybe we might release a 1.9 version making the api changes that we're
intending to do on 2.0 transparent bug marking them as deprecated.

Doing that we make easier to projects to move to new (and not yet
implemented) 2.0 API.

> I will be releasing parted-1.8.0 final soon.  A lot of great patches
> have come in and we have a pretty solid code base for a 1.8
> release. The 1.8.0 final release will most likely not contain
> up-to-date i18n data, but when that comes in from the Free Translation
> Project, I'll merge it and do a point release.

The last change that I would like to see in is the backtrace
support. That will make our life a bit easier to track down problems
and I think it's a very simple patch that would be a big plus to our
development effort.

> The future of the parted-1.8.x branch is one of maintenance.  I do not
> want to introduce any huge new features, but things such as detecting
> new partition or device types and such is fine with me.  Anything we
> can add without destroying the API is good candidate stuff for the
> parted-1.8.x branch.

Nice.

> WHERE IT LIVES:  For now, I am working against the subversion
> repository as the primary source tree for parted-1.8.x.  This is where
> I will be releasing from.  I told Leslie that I absolutely do not want
> to change version control systems in the middle of progressing towards
> a release. He agreed.
>
> WHERE IT WILL PROBABLY MOVE TO:  The new darcs repository.  Once 1.8.0
> final goes out, I would like to investigate moving it over to darcs
> and keeping the branch there.  I just don't want to mess with that
> while I'm trying to get 1.8.0 final out.  I hope everyone understands.
> Once it's moved, I see no reason to continue using subversion for any
> tasks.

I've synced both branches. The same code is available on both SCM for
now.

Once you release 1.8 I'll tag it too on darcs and make it a
checkpoint. It'll reduce the amount of revisions that we'll need to
get to work on new features and like.

> parted-2.x
> ----------
> Many discussions have gone on about what will be in this branch.  I
> think we have a lot of good minds working on it and we have some great
> ideas with regard to API overhaul, testing suite work, and user
> interface enhancements.
>
> Going forward, I and other developers will be focusing their attention
> on the parted-2.x work.  As I handle maintenance work for the
> parted-1.8.x, that will most likely involve backporting changes to
> that repository.  Makes sense, right?

Yes. It makes sense, of course.

I just think that, between 1.8 and 2.0 we might release a transitional
release whithout the new features but marking the changed API as
deprecated.

Another options is to write a good documentaion about the changed API
and make it available to programmers to use when converting
applications from 1.8 to 2.0 version of libparted.

> WHERE IT LIVES:  The new darcs repository.
>
>
> OK, so that's where my understanding is with all of this.  Is everyone
> on the same page?

Most of things, yes. :-D

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