Strategies for 'main' Branch & Translations Updates

[tajmone]

This thread takes on from an off-topic discussion that began in #29, regarding the strategy for including new libraries in main and updating them to mirror the latest changes of the English Foundation Library...

Here are some premise-assumptions which I think we more or less all agree upon:

• The English Library is the reference library which all other translations should try to keep up with, in terms of new features and design changes.
  • This is not an absolute rule, because:
    • Some translations might need to differ from the English implementation due to language differences.
    • If a translated library adds a new feature that is considered of general interested, it can be added to the English library too (thus becoming a feature to which other translation should aspire to).
    • Sometime library translations updates might not be possible due to the need of a native language speaker to help revising the text. E.g. the Spanish library is currently suffering from this, and only updates that don't involve tweaking the Spanish text are possible at the moment.
  • Hopefully, the collaborative nature of the project should result in enough communication between maintainers to ensure that any changes after v1.0.0 are discussed before hand, so that they can planned, and we have the chance to discover if the feature is not implementable in other translations (for whatever language limit might be standing in its way).
• The English and Spanish libraries are to be treated differently from new translations because they are based on pre-existing libraries (both based on ALAN Lib v0.6.x), and the Artistic License 2.0 demands that all changes are annotated — hence the need to track their CHANGELOG, starting from v0.1.0, which is their original codebase, throughout all the various changes.
• New translation differ from the English and Spanish libraries, since their authors might adopt different development strategies:
  • Build them from the ground up, one module at the time, following the latest English Foundation.
  • Start working on the v0.1.0 codebase (or any other Beta release of the English), and only integrate further changes once the code is all translated.
  • E.g. the Italian Library is currently based on English ALN Lib v0.6.2 code, but also on the Italian StdLib 2 translation, so it's a mixed effort of recycling the StdLib code and then adapting it to the structure of the old ALAN Lib code. Integration of English Foundation changes will either happen after v0.1.0 is ready, or might be included therein (whichever is more practical).
• Libraries on the main branch should be:
  • Updated following SemVer, i.e. each change to the library sources should correspond to a new version (even in Beta).
  • Each new version/commit should provide a fully working library, and all its associated Rake tasks should pass the build (soon Rake will be added to Travis CI builds).

The above points should more or less resume the point of agreement that have surfaced so far. We still don't have an explicit strategy covering these points — after all, until the English library reaches v1.0.0 and ALAN Beta8 is released, none of the present libraries are really production ready (at least not as envisioned by the new Foundation Library goals, although their code works fine).

All the rest (and of course, even all the points listed above) is an open discussion...