Make new release

[corneliusroemer]

It would be amazing if you could make another release now officially supporting osx-arm64

I'd be happy to test a release candidate

[pablodelara]

Hi @corneliusroemer. We are planning a release on the first quarter of next year. We don't have enough resources to do more frequent releases.

[ShamrockLee]

Here are my two cents as a package maintainer of the Nixpkgs project.

I recently found that updating isa-l to dbaf284 solves the build failure of isa-l and its reverse dependencies on the Aarch64 macOS platforms (NixOS/nixpkgs#350167). As XRootD recently started to depend on isa-l, such an update is necessary to keep CERN ROOT available for particle physicists using Mac M1/M2.

An official release would be helpful to software packaging projects like Nixpkgs, as release tags are often more accessible than a pre-releasing revision. I've heard that some other packaging projects discourage packaging against an unstable upstream version. Still, I understand that making an official release is not just about adding a Git tag but implies much more effort and further support.

Thank you for maintaining such a great project, and I'm looking forward to the new release!

[rhpvorderman]

I have a branch with 2.31 + just the mac fixes here: https://github.com/rhpvorderman/isa-l/tree/macos-arm-patch

The conda-forge build also includes those patches.

[pablodelara]

Thanks for your input,@ShamrockLee. Would adding a tag be somewhat useful at the moment? We are not in a position to make a release now.

[ShamrockLee]

Thank you for replying!

Would adding a tag be somewhat helpful at the moment? We are not in a position to make a release now.

It would be helpful if the tag is in a similar format to other versions, like v2.32.0-<preXX/devXX/etc.> or v2.31.0-<...>.

Stable releases are often mapped to git tags.which means we would write something like (rev = "v${version}";)

stdenv.mkDerivation (finalAttrs: {
  pname = "isa-l";
  version = "2.31.0";

  src = fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "intel";
    repo = "isa-l";
    rev = "v{finalAttrs.version}";
    hash = "sha256-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=";
  };

  ...;
})

As for unstable versions, the rev attributes are specified manually as the Git commit hash, and the version is defined as <nearest version before>-unstable-<commit date in ISO 8601>.

Although Nix's builtins.compareVersions might get confused by the suffix, this is generally a minor problem.