On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Marcel Offermans <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree with Roman that it's good to have some kind of plan or roadmap, > feature or date driven. > Personally, I would like to see regular releases, even if they contain only > minor updates. > If big feature implementations would block releases, we could consider > developing them on feature branches.
With my mentor's hat on I'd say that 2 things are pretty important to the project: understanding what the project plans (even if long terms) are for the next release and being able to easily track those goals. Personally, I expect every honest release to be a combination of the: #1 general feel of the developer community that this particular set of source code is 'good' #2 a user community vouching for the fact that by and large it satisfies their use cases #3 developer/PMC community vouching for the fact that to the best of their knowledge the bits that comprise the release are safe to use from legal standpoint #4 a signal to the downstream projects that they may latch onto the new set of bits and expect them to provide a stable based for them Now, releases are NOT a given in the open source projects. In fact, a massively successful OS project I happen to be a part of (FFmpeg) used to make a point out of NOT having formal releases. The rationale there was that even thought we all were extremely comfortable at claiming #1/#3 pretty much for any arbitrary point of our trunk (we practiced a 'golden trunk' development model) we had no resources nor interest when it came to investing in #2 and #4. That flexibility, of course, was a direct consequence of not being part of any umbrella OS initiative. If you're just on GH or SF -- you can have any governance model. I think it would be fair to say that being an ASF project comes with an assumption that you will find time and resources to invest into all 4 of the above things. To some extent it is a bit of a forcing function (especially #3) and it needs to be budgeted in when a project decides to go with ASF. Hence, as a mentor, I'd expect Celix to figure out when it is time for it to have such a next milestone. It doesn't have to be full of exciting new features, it just has to provide some level of incremental progress and also deliver on #1-#4. Let me know if you guys need any help with driving the release. Also, I think at some point I might inquire about somebody potentially volunteering as an RM. Thanks, Roman.
