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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

Issue 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 CI job will update the release assets and force-push to the stable tag.

Release automation

Neovim automation includes a backport bot. Trigger the action by labeling a PR with backport release-X.Y. See .github/workflows/backport.yml.

Third-party dependencies

These "bundled" dependencies can be updated by bumping their versions in cmake.deps/CMakeLists.txt. Some can be auto-bumped by scripts/bump-deps.sh.

Vendored dependencies

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

  • src/mpack/: libmpack
    • send improvements upstream!
  • src/xdiff/: xdiff
  • src/cjson/: lua-cjson
  • src/nvim/lib/: Klib
  • runtime/lua/vim/inspect.lua: inspect.lua
  • src/nvim/tui/terminfo_defs.h: terminfo definitions
    • Run scripts/update_terminfo.sh to update these definitions.
  • treesitter parsers

Forks

We may maintain forks, if we are waiting on upstream changes: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Deps

See also