[Project-managers] Proposed Version and Release System for COIN-OR Projects

[Brad Bell]

Ted Ralphs wrote:

>Dear project managers,
>
>After the recent successful transition to Trac, SVN, and the autotools,
>the Technical Leadership Council has taken as its next challenge the
>task of developing a standard system of assigning version numbers and
>developing stable releases for COIN-OR projects. 
>
...

>A brief outline of the proposal is posted on the TLC wiki here:
>
>https://projects.coin-or.org/CoinTLC/wiki/VersionsAndReleases
>
As I use svn, the trunk only contains version that have passed all the 
automated tests
(on my development machine). Other versions are checked into development 
branches.

I think of getting the subversion repository as a developer's method of 
obtaining the project.
Users would probably download the corresponding tarballs instead.

In addition, I like the
    "release early release often"
philosophy so that problems can be found and fixed close time to when 
the corresponding
source code was created or modified.  The automated tests can (and 
should) be
built and run by a user before she or he does a
    make install
If one of the tests does not pass on the user's machine, they should
report the problem back to the developers (and not install the new version).

Thus, it is crucial, in my current way of doing development,
that tarballs be created from the current version of the trunk.