Notes on maintaining the Neovim project.
- 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
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
+planlabel 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 "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:
- Fix the bug on
master. - Cherry-pick the fix to
release-x.y. - Cut a release from
release-x.y.- Run
./scripts/release.sh - Update (force-push) the remote
stabletag. - The nightly job
will update the release assets based on the
stabletag.
- Run
These "bundled" dependencies can be updated by bumping their versions in third-party/CMakeLists.txt:
These dependencies are "vendored" (inlined), we need to update the sources manually:
We also maintain some forks, particularly for Windows, if we are waiting on upstream changes: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Deps