Monday, July 6, 1998

ANNOUNCEMENT:  Revised Release policy for LessTif


INTRODUCTION: 

This is a general announcement of the new, improved release policy for
LessTif.

PURPOSE:

The LessTif project is gaining momentum.  We're attempting to move to a
more Bazaar-style development, and part of that process is rapid releases.
The lesstif project has always made its current source available every day
in the form of lesstif-current.  However, we recognize that not everyone
has the time or the inclination to follow lesstif-current every day, but
many people would like current "stable" versions released more frequently.
The lesstif team also needs feedback from current releases.  Therefore, we
have decided to alter our release policy and move to a more rapid-release
schedule.  We've been doing this for about a month now, and it seems to be
working well.  We seem to be getting more feedback, and patches are
rolling in.

POLICY:

The new policy for releases is as follows:

We have started using three-part release numbers of the form 0.xx.yy.  The
first 0 indicates that we have not yet met our goal of source
compatibility with Motif 1.2.  XX is the major release number, (currently
85).  Major releases releases will come about every other month, when we
feel that significant changes/improvements have been made and the code
stabilized enough for a general release.  YY stands for the minor number,
and we will attempt to release minor versions every other week or so.
Minor versions will compile on our reference platforms (Linux and
FreeBSD), and should probably compile on others, but the changes don't
justify a major release.

We will announce major and minor releases in several places, including the
lesstif mailing list.  Since we're still in heavy development, and haven't
released a version 1.0.0 yet, there's not a "stable" tree that people
should be using while we work on new features like with the linux kernel.
We'd prefer all users of LessTif to use the most recent release; the major
and minor release numbers are intended to indicate the degree of change
between versions and indicate how important a given upgrade is.

Jon Christopher
Lesstif Releasemeister
and the Lesstif Core Team
