Release Engineering

[yonas]

Release Engineering

According to stats, the last release of bat was downloaded over 300,000 times! 🎉

Releases have been spaced out for a year, though. Can we create plan of action on this?

Some projects do major version upgrades every 12 months, and very rapid updates for minor / patch upgrades.

Schedule

Can we commit to no more than 3 months for minor upgrades, and weekly patch level?

Help Needed

Do you need any help preparing releases?

Funding?

Road to v1.0

What's required to get to v1.0?

Let's create a list of absolutely required features, bug fixes, etc so we can finally cut this project's first major release.

[keith-hall]

Hi, thanks for bringing this question up.

Road to v1.0

I would think a built-in pager (#1053) or minus (#1540) would be essential for v1.0, simply because we currently receive a lot of support requests from people whom don't understand how bat currently relies on the default pager they have, usually less.

The other major limitation at the moment is syntect, the syntax highlighting library bat uses is far behind in support. This effectively means there are many syntax highlighting mistakes that can't easily be fixed. Either having syntect updated with fixes/support for trishume/syntect#271 and trishume/syntect#323 or having support in bat to use another up-to-date high-quality & fast syntax highlighting engine would be necessary for a v1.0 IMHO. Supporting 2 engines could get messy fast, so I'd personally like to see syntect improved, unless someone can convince me that switching away from it completely to something else is in our best interests...

In terms of other critical bug fixes or features, I guess it would be useful to look at the backlog, and try to sort by votes etc. and decide.

Help Needed

Do you need any help preparing releases?

I would guess this part is not too difficult, though I have never done it myself. We have https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/blob/master/doc/release-checklist.md at least. Probably we just need enough spare time and motivation to do it - currently we try to consider when we have enough significant changes to warrant making a new release. Probably we are overdue in this respect...

[keith-hall]

Regarding the release schedule, this discussion/poll seems quite relevant :) #2200