Present Perfect

Threw out a new mach release today. I did some nice fixes over the last two months related to reverting to a clean build state, because I was getting annoyed at various random failure cases. Most of them were happening when packages that are in the build list get an upgrade available, and then of course it tries to remove those. If the update is, say, glibc, oops :)

Lately I've been wondering about project maintenance and version numbering. I'm not getting any younger, and basically in the last ten years I don't think I've ever released any software that made it past 0.x Which, when you think of it, is a little silly, because I've written software that works fine, fulfills my needs, and works for others as well. I mean, really, when you are happy with it and you feel ok with recommending it to other people, 1.x should be fine.

So, given that mach mostly just works, that I'm already writing a next generation of it that's easier to maintain, and that I don't plan any major feature additions anyway to this one, I should be moving it to a 1.0 release. So this release jumped from 0.4.9 to 0.9.0.

I vaguely toyed with the idea of releasing it as 2.0 even (because this is the second generation of mach - the first one was makefile-based), but then I would feel forced to number releases of mach3 with 3.x, and it would feel wrong to have a "new-and-unstable" mach3-2.9 or whatever against a mature stable mach2-2.0.

I don't know why I obsess over these little details. Anyway, I am going to break my self-imposed ban on 1.x versions soon.

I Celebrated the release by packaging the latest Twisted releases, which are now split across several modules, as well as a huge chunk of the divmod stack. It's very satisfying to be able to do

mach build python-*/*.spec

, watch it build 15 src.rpm's, order them correctly, and build one after the other without a hitch...

More on twisted and DivMod later.

Threw out a new mach release today. I did some nice fixes over the last two months related to reverting to a clean build state, because I was getting annoyed...