Re: [AD] Allegro 4.2.0 RC2

[Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Hell, even the guys from SDL announced recently a "prerelease" of a
> minor increment update. Or recent Linux policy. We are all going to
> die under the invisible weight of perfection if things keep this way.
> I guess I've been using CVS for too long.

At least for me, another reason for having a long interval between releases 
has nothing to do with Allegro or bugs or CVS, it has to do with time: if 
I spend five days per week working and programming in front of a computer, 
then that doesn't leave much time for doing other things and it makes 
doing things that don't involve computers or programming more of a 
priority during weekends.
In other words, I think it's just been a very busy time. Hopefully that'll 
settle down for a bit now.

> > I think we're very close now though.  Can we agree that the next
> > release ought to be the last release before 4.2.0, or 4.2.0 itself?

Oh yes, very much yes. Although I'd really like to have the new demo in a 
shape where it can be bundled with Allegro by then, I don't think it 
should hold up the release. That said, there are (I think) some MacOS X 
issues that want looking into that Pete is already working on.

Regarding the demo(s), I'll see if I can make a webpage with archives of 
all previous demo's patched up to compile and work with the latest Allegro 
(I already posted something similar on acc a while ago). That'll be nice 
for historic reasons.

> I'm more interested to know any plans about 4.0.x maintenance plans.
> There are people concerned it doesn't compile with latest versions
> of gcc or some other compiler. And after all, that's what x.x.1
> increments are supposed to be for, fix minor issues.

Well, about compiling or not, I don't think it matters much: if people want 
to compile it, then that's probably because they want to compile other 
code to link against it too. In that case they could use 4.2 just as well.
That said, it might be somewhat bad, from a historical perspective, to have 
a 4.0.3 that doesn't compile with new compilers.
I don't really look forward to the idea of pulling the asm fixes that went 
into 4.2 back to 4.0 though, so I'm tempted to say we could just leave the 
binary version and tell people to link new projects to 4.2 instead.

Evert