neovim/MAINTAIN.md

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Maintaining the Neovim project
==============================
Notes on maintaining the Neovim project.
General guidelines
------------------
* Decide by cost-benefit
* Write down what was decided
* Constraints are good
* Use automation to solve problems
* Never break the API... but sometimes break the UI
Ticket triage
-------------
In practice we haven't found a way to forecast more precisely than "next" and
"after next". So there are usually one or two (at most) planned milestones:
- Next bugfix-release (1.0.x)
- Next feature-release (1.x.0)
The forecasting problem might be solved with an explicit priority system (like
Bram's todo.txt). Meanwhile the Neovim priority system is defined by:
- PRs nearing completion.
- Issue labels. E.g. the `+plan` label increases the ticket's priority merely
for having a plan written down: it is _closer to completion_ than tickets
without a plan.
- Comment activity or new information.
Anything that isn't in the next milestone, and doesn't have a finished PR—is
just not something you care very much about, by construction. Post-release you
can review open issues, but chances are your next milestone is already getting
full... :)
Release policy
--------------
Release "often", but not "early".
The (unreleased) `master` branch is the "early" channel; it should not be
released if it's not stable. High-risk changes may be merged to `master` if
the next release is not imminent.
For maintenance releases, create a `release-x.y` branch. If the current release
has a major bug:
1. Fix the bug on `master`.
2. Cherry-pick the fix to `release-x.y`.
3. Cut a release from `release-x.y`.
- Run `./scripts/release.sh`
- Update (force-push) the remote `stable` tag.
- The [nightly job](https://github.com/neovim/bot-ci/blob/master/ci/nightly.sh)
will update the release assets based on the `stable` tag.
See also
--------
- https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/862
- https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt