We're in the process of releasing our second set of modules. This sheds
new light on the module version and release process discussions we had
earlier. It also raises some questions about how we ideally want to
handle certain scenarios now that we are forced to deal with more than
one release.
1) Should the first release of a new module use the prevailing version
at the time or do we intend to always start with the logical "1" of a
first release? For quiesce we used the prevailing version -
0.2-incubating.
2) How will we make multiple component versions available in the future
for download? If we always release all modules (as we did in our 0.1
and 0.2 releases) then it's simple - we can create a download page for
each release and we can create documentation per release. However, if
we start to release the modules individually things get a bit more
complicated. One possibility is to move from one common download page
to a download page per module.
3) Are there other benefits in keeping the module versions consistent
and concurrently releasing all modules rather than individual modules
that we haven't really considered? I'm thinking about things like
documentation, test validation, and samples.
Thinking more about #3 - It seems it might be very difficult to maintain
our documentation and samples once the module versions begin to diverge.
Changes to one module might force us to want to release or update some
other module, ... such as the case with (and perhaps only with) samples.
In fact, samples might be impacted by the release of each module if we
want to try to keep them as current as possible. This might result in a
proliferation of sample releases. Moreover, the combination of
modules/versions we use in our sample releases might not demonstrate or
validate a common set of modules/versions that a user might choose.
Yes, all valid versions based upon dependencies *should* work fine
together ... but that assumes nobody makes mistakes. There is a certain
comfort (from a user perspective) in knowing that a particular set of
modules has been tested together in some fashion which can at least be
partially demonstrated in our samples.
I understand why we started down the path of individual components and I
definitely agree that it has value ... I'm just rethinking the decision
now that we are doing our second release and have to deal with multiple
versions for the first time. The second release begins to set the
precedent for how we deal with some of these things. The fact that we
basically released everything again with a consistent version makes me
wonder if that should be our standard process instead of individual
component versions.
--
Joe
- release process questions around versions Joe Bohn
-
