About Julia's development policy regarding Windows

General Usage
60

The release process for patch (1.2.x) releases is slightly different than that for minor releases (1.y.0). The former are wayyy more conservative in what they include; everything must be straightforward bug-fixes. Patch releases are meant to be completely unobtrusive. They’re released much more frequently to help everyone avoid known and fixed bugs. Concretely, this means that the 1.11.6 patch release should not introduce any new regressions over 1.11.5; it’s no longer being compared against 1.10. Yes, it often fixes regressions over 1.10, but the time to find new regressions — and block releases — is in the much slower beta/rc cycle for the minor release. Once folks are using a particular minor release, it’s very much a good thing to get fixed bugs out as quickly as possible.

You keep talking about a checklist. There are multiple visible “checklists”: CI, PkgEval, backports PRs, issue labels, and milestones. The hardest part, though, is making sure the right line-items appear on them. But this is where open source can shine. There are multiple ways to make issues appear on one of those checklists, even without any special permissions:

  • Add tests to Julia and the packages you use! Testing current working functionality is a great way to get involved in the process and broken tests are the absolute best way to ensure attention.
  • Help review the 4k+ open issues on Julia itself, particularly the ones that are missing labels or haven’t been touched in a while. Make sure they have MWEs and still reproduce, and you can kindly ask for attention, too.
  • Help bubble-up issues from the 10k registered packages to a JuliaLang/julia issue if it’s likely a problem in Julia itself. Everyone will have their own definition of what the most “core” or “fundamental” packages are; if a package you care about has a regression from 1.10 to 1.11, it’s probably better placed as a Julia issue. Open one! Link to the package issue and try to minimize the problem as best you can.
  • Pop in on a release branch in preparation and ask if some issue in Julia or the ecosystem should be blocking.
  • Test the ongoing v1.12 beta, report issues, and help ensure they’re categorized correctly! Now’s the best time :slight_smile:

I’m sorry this was so frustrating for you. And I get it; burned time really stinks.

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