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
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.
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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 Sometimes I build HEAD on my Ubuntu box to test new features (Ubuntu has some outdated version in repo if I recall correctly).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.