[Openmcl-devel] ccl 1.11 release and GitHub

[R. Matthew Emerson]

It's been an informal goal of the CCL project to do releases on an approximately semi-annual basis (i.e., about every six months).

For numerous reasons, there hasn't been a new release since CCL 1.11 came out some 15 months ago.

It is going to take a fair amount of time to get the current 1.12 development branch into shape for release.  For instance, there are problems with the 32-bit x86 lisp that are causing multiple test suite failures, the 32-bit Solaris-ish lisp is just totally broken, there's some issue that's causing the 32-bit ARM lisp not to run on the Raspberry Pi 3, etc.  Nothing insurmountable, I don't think, but still, there's work to be done there.

So, I expect 1.11 to live on for a while longer.

The idea behind a release has always been that it would be stable, and that the only modifications we would make on a release branch would be important bug fixes.  If I make GitHub the repository for 1.11, I think I'd need to make a few modifications to 1.11: for instance, I'd want to merge something like https://github.com/Clozure/ccl/commit/24a472b6e37d88de8df2710b4d4ac2198742dfb4 to 1.11 so that the lisp can report some sort of version information.  Changing the output of (lisp-implementation-version) like that commit does is not the sort of change that would normally go into a release branch.

Since 1.12 won't be ready for some time, I am considering making a 1.11.1 release, and hosting that on GitHub.  The 1.11.1 release would be binary-compatible with 1.11, but it would contain a few changes (like the version stuff mentioned above) that wouldn't normally go in a release branch.  What do you think?