Should fpm release versions more often

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I am curious if we should adopt a more frequent release schedule for fpm (and potentially other Fortran-lang projects). A while back I read a blog post Major Version Numbers are Not Sacred by Tom Preston-Werner creator of Semantic Versioning and it changed my perspective on releases. I think fpm releasing its updates more frequently to all its release channels, conda-forge, brew, etc. would greatly benefit its user base and growth as a build tool.

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See Establishing a release schedule · Issue #416 · fortran-lang/fpm · GitHub for a previous suggestion. From the fpm side this was addressed by adding a continuous delivery workflow.

I stand to what I wrote back then, which means whoever is contributing to fpm should be in charge of setting the pace of the releases. This also means any contributor is welcome to initiate a new release (best coordinated with other contributors), the workflow is described in detail at Release Process · fortran-lang/fpm Wiki · GitHub.

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I think there’s been a pretty impressive track record of not introducing bugs or breaking changes so far, so more frequent releases shouldn’t be a problem. However, I think the work on fpm has been somewhat sporadic, so we shouldn’t release so much on a schedule as much as just when something new is ready. That’s kind of a nebulous metric, so I think @awvwgk 's point is correct; let’s just create a release as soon as a feature is done that somebody would like to have available in a release, and any contributor is at liberty to call for that.

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The rolling release is great but I don’t think it addresses the distribution of fpm through its packaging tools e.g. conda-forge. What I was referring to was exactly this

Whether or not we should try and issue releases more often, not necessarily for every merged PR but whenever a new feature is added or certain bugs are fixed so people using brew and anaconda could have access to these features, which in turn will make detecting bugs easier since more users will be running an fpm version that is closer to the main branch.

I am in the camp that releases should be often and incremental without massive Changelogs.

PS For clarity purposes, I am not advocating for a periodic release schedule, just more frequent in terms of features added.

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