Do you use Kakoune releases?

Originally, Kakoune didn’t have official releases, and if you wanted to use it you would just build the latest commit, whatever it was. Sometimes Linux distributions or other third-party packagers would pick some particular commit, according to their own particular tastes. However, for the past… I want to say six months or so, there have been semi-regular releases, where mawww waits for particular bugs to be fixed or breaking changes to land.

Now that releases have been going on for a while, I’m curious how many people use them, so I decided to make a poll:

  • I prefer third-party provided packages, whether or not they’re official releases
  • I prefer official releases, from third-party packagers or built from official tarballs
  • I build from git master whenever I see an interesting change land

0 voters

If you do more than one of these, pick the one you do most often.

Note: Some third-party package repositories provide packages that will build the latest git version, whatever it is, rather than a specific, distro-chosen version. Such latest-git-version packages would count as “I build from git master” rather than “I prefer third-party provided packages” because you’re not trusting the packager to pick a version for you.

2 Likes

Kakoune is like video games. When a new feature airs or a bug is fixed I don’t want to wait the next release.

Also, plug-ins are usually based on HEAD.

I use releases and all my plugins are based on last stable release. I don’t have time to follow HEAD and tweak plugins constantly.

It’s convenient since Void Linux (my daily driver) has Kakoune packaged. Sometimes I build HEAD on my Ubuntu box to test new features (Ubuntu has some outdated version in repo if I recall correctly).

I am toying with using the brew release on Mac, from 1/20 I think – so far so good. But most of the time I prefer a more modern.

Same as @alexherbo2, I rebuild master if I see something interesting. My distribution doesn’t package it so I have to build it myself, and since an update is as simple as git pull; make there is little reason not tho get the latest. For my plugins I try not to use unreleased feature, so usually I keep master compatible with the latest release and I do breaking changes in a branch.

I’m trying my best to keep features available in both HEAD and Release versions. It’s either try ... catch block that defines different behavior and informs user, or I wait until changes hit release. This also because on PC I’m using HEAD builds from AUR, but on my mobile phone (yes I’m doing a lot of work on my mobile, more than a half commits on my GH are from phone) I’m using stable releases available through Termux package.

I’m definitely not using releases, because I poke at the code too much.