[zeromq-dev] ZeroMQ 4.2 release, planning

[Pieter Hintjens]

Hi all,

I'm just throwing some ideas on the table. We have a good package of
work on master and it's probably time to make a 4.2 release.

Luca has already back-ported the enable/disable draft design from
zproject (CZMQ et al). Yay! So we can now release stable master
safely, while continuing to refine and extend the draft API sections.

I propose:

- to end with the stable fork policy; this was needed years ago when
we had massively unstable masters. It's no longer a problem.
- to use the github release function for libzmq releases and deprecate
the separate delivery of tarballs.
- we aim to make a 4.2.0 rc asap, then fix any issues we get, with
patch releases as usual.
- we backport the release function to older maintained releases (4.1,
3.2) so that their tarballs are provided by github instead of
downloads.zeromq.org.

Problems:

- this will break a few things that depend on downloads.zeromq.org. To
be fixed as we go.
- github tarballs are not identical to source tarballs, particularly
they lack `configure`. I propose changing our autotools build
instructions so they always start with `./autogen,sh` no matter where
the sources come from.

I think this will work and also let us gracefully deprecate/switch off
the downloads box.

-Pieter