Hi Tim,

On Aug 18, 2017, at 4:08 AM, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote:

Thanks Marcus - and definitely we all appreciate that its holiday season and that a lot of this is driven by community and people donating their free time.

I���m still a bit unclear on the moving parts. To paraphrase what you have said:

We start each yearly cycle with a X.0 new release. Then there may be point releases 6.1, 6.2 etc where there is a breaking change (typically a new VM I guess - but is there anything else that would cause a .x release?).


Ignoring plugins, since VMs are backward compatible, new VMs are never breaking changes.  A new vm may have a bug in it, but that would be superseded with a fixed vm asap, the previous good vm being used until that time.  But we never release a new vm that won't run old image, except in a major release cycle, and even then not every release cycle.  The VM is much like a real processor which always runs code in its instruction set but new instructions get added from time to time.

The change from Squeak/Pharo 4.x to 5.x was a major change (Spur memory manager).  But now we're back in the regime of backward compatibility in which the 6.x VMs will happily run 5.x images.  

But indeed this simple story might be violated by important plugins.

Then there are  ���hot fixes��� that causes an image number change (these have worked there way through the CI, as it triggered a new build)? The implication is then that what I download from Pharo.org is the last point release, but then I can go and find a newer image ���hot fix��� if I want some of the latest more minor fixes (and I guess this then answers m .x question above - as I guess that if there was a major bug in the image it might also trigger a new point release so that new users would get that fix when downloading from pharo.org?)

So a reasonably active Pharo user (but not a more bleeding edge new release user) should typically download the latest image every month to stay current?

We should encourage more seasoned users to also try a leading edge point release, and apply the latest hot fix image particularly in the latter part of year when we are trying to stabilise for the next release cycle. And then there are the instructions about taking the next leap for contributing back���

Is this right? 

Tim

On 18 Aug 2017, at 08:56, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr> wrote:


What I think would have been good is to list all the updates that where done between
releasing 6.0 and 6.1 *as part of the changelog* of 6.1 (even though they were already
in the image that you got a minute before Pharo6.1 was released, as they where released as
hot fixes before).


The changelog of things done between releasing 6.0 and the release of 6.1:

20262 Update Iceberg to 0.5.4
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20262

20268 update iceberg v0.5.5
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20268

20226 TabMorph should use stepping mechanism for animating background building
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20226

20238 Run out of memory the image hangs without out of memory warning
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20238

20218 Master branch (Pharo 6) needs to be safely merged into development branch (Pharo 7).
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20218

20187 Request use of block in certain methods
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20187

20188 Request representation of integer literal without float exponent
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20188

20182 Extra dot in literal array
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20182

18760 Failing test: WeakAnnouncerTest>>#testNoDeadWeakSubscriptions
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/18760

20186 Request removal of extra statement separators (dot)
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20186

20185 Request pipe after block argments
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20185

20183 TraitDescription>>fileOutLocalMethodsInCategory:on: method temp var name overlap
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20183

20184 Request space between argument and selector in StdioStream>>next:
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20184

20167 Regression with PNGReaderWriter in P6
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20167

20198 inner structure access does not work on multiple architecture
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20198

20110 AllocationTest>>#testOutOfMemorySignal not well suited to 64-bit
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20110

20096 Add script pragma to SpaceTally>>printSpaceAnalysis
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20096

20174 In the debug halo of a morph: clicking on "inspect morph" and "explore morph" bring up the same window.
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20174

20093 Missing source stamp makes changes hard to view
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20093

20148 transforming deprecations should take #showWarning into account
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20148

20146 ZnHTTPSTests>>#testGetPharoVersion started to fail
https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20146