Today I pushed the final “go” button, announcing Apache Subversion 1.12.2, 1.10.6, and 1.9.12. Thank-you, everyone who helped with reporting, developing, reviewing and testing the changes that went into these releases.
Release-managing was a bit of a struggle this time around. While Subversion has moved into the “mature” phase of its life with possiblly the most users ever, the number of active contributors has been dwindling, which is understandable. Recently it reached the point where the development community could no longer meet its self-imposed requirements for three members to approve each back-ported change. As the release was stalled even though we had fixes waiting that were otherwise ready to release, we — those of us who are still around to discuss such things — agreed to lower those requirements as a pragmatic move. Then I was able to merge in all the outstanding fixes in the queue. As a result, these releases have a few more changes in than they otherwise would have, albeit small changes as they are only patch releases.
Looking to future releases, it seems to me one of the most important issues we need to address at this stage of the project’s life is to streamline the release process, in two different ways — from the inside, making it easier for us to produce a release — and more importantly from the outside perspective, making it easier for end users and packagers to receive an upgrade. We are currently discussing this and other aspects of Subversion’s “community health”.
And when I say “we” — the Subversion project — that’s you too, if you want to be included. It might surprise some users to hear that there is no team dedicated to producing Subversion for you. There is just me, using a bit of my employer‘s time, and a very few others using a bit of their personal time, and … potentially you or a bit of your employer’s time? If you care about Subversion continuing to be available, and you can offer any kind of help — perhaps with building and releasing it in one of the many forms it’s distributed these days — you could make all the difference.
Could you be a part of true, free, libre, open source software development? Please come and say hello in the #svn channel (on IRC or on Matrix) or on the mailing lists.