neovim/MAINTAIN.md

Maintaining the Neovim project

Notes on maintaining the Neovim project.

See also: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt

Ticket Triage

In practice we haven't found a meaningful way to forecast more precisely than "next" and "after next". That means 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 (RDY).
• 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 RDY 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

The goal is "early and often".

Up to now we use only one branch, the master branch.

• If master is unstable we don't release.
• If the last release has a major bug, we:
  1. Fix the bug on master.
  2. Disable or remove any known risks present on master.
  3. Cut a release from master.

This is a bit silly, but it works ok. And it keeps master from biting off more feature-creep than it can chew.

See also: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/862