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MAINTAIN.md

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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... but sometimes break the UI

Ticket triage

In practice we haven't found a way to forecast more precisely than "next" and "after next". So 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.
  • 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 finished 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.

The neovim repository includes a backport github action. In order to trigger the action, a PR must be labeled with a label matching the form backport release-0.X. Note, the PR must have a description in the issue body, or the backport will fail.

Third-party dependencies

These "bundled" dependencies can be updated by bumping their versions in third-party/CMakeLists.txt:

scripts/bump-dep.sh is a script that can automate this process for LuaJIT, Luv, libuv & tree-sitter. See usage guide:

  • Run ./scripts/bump-deps.sh --dep Luv --version 1.43.0-0 to update a dependency. See ./scripts/bump-deps.sh -h for more detailed usage
  • Run ./scripts/bump-deps.sh --pr to create a pr To generate the default PR title and body, the script uses the most recent commit (not in master) with prefix build(deps):

These dependencies are "vendored" (inlined), we need to update the sources manually:

We also maintain some forks, particularly for Windows, if we are waiting on upstream changes: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Deps

See also