neovim/MAINTAIN.md

Maintaining the Neovim project

Notes on maintaining the Neovim project.

General guidelines

• Decide by cost-benefit
• Write down what was decided
• Constraints are good
• Use automation to solve problems
• Never break the API

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

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:

1. Fix the bug on master.
2. Cherry-pick the fix to release-x.y.
3. Cut a release from release-x.y.
   • Run ./scripts/release.sh
   • Update (force-push) the remote stable tag.
   • The nightly job will update the release assets based on the stable tag.

See also

• https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/862
• https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt