[Openmcl-devel] ccl 1.11 release and GitHub

[R. Matthew Emerson]

> On Feb 28, 2017, at 3:30 PM, Robert Munyer <2420506348 at munyer.com> wrote:
> 
> ISTM that there have already been six 1.11.x releases: two in
> December 2015, and four in 2016.
> 
> A person who downloaded via Subversion is anywhere from zero to
> six changesets "ahead of" a person who downloaded only via HTTP
> or FTP, depending on exactly when the former person downloaded.
> 
> I didn't notice, until yesterday, how misleading it is that the
> "Getting Clozure CL" page says "The current release of Clozure CL
> is version 1.11", and links via HTTP and FTP to a pub/release/1.11
> directory that still contains the November 2015 1.11 release.

You may be right about CCL's release process being misleading.

The idea was that users would either get ccl via a checkout (that included binaries), or else download an archive which also contained binaries.

I think that the archives are (or once were) made from a checkout:  that is, they contain all the source-control metadata (i.e., the .svn directory) so that you could simply svn up.

Thus, to stay current on 1.11, you'd download the archive, and then "svn up" every so often to pick up important bug fixes.  We have not, as a rule, updated the archives or the release binaries.  The thinking, as I say, was that you could simply use the binaries to rebuild updated sources as needed.

Given some better release automation, I could see the benefit of regenerating updated 1.11.x binaries as bug fixes get made on the 1.11 release branch.