Hi Reinier, there's a thesis written in 2007 called "Quality Improvement in Volunteer. Free and Open Source Software Projects. Exploring the Impact of Release Management". It studies time-based releases in volunteer FOSS software. Basically, the idea is that time-based releases are the best solution for a project like Darcs, where everyone is a volunteer and there is enough work done in the lapses of 6 months between releases, so that each release is interesting in itself. Otherwise, feature-based releases come out of the blue, nobody knows really how to schedule their work, and releases are usually delayed.
For this process to happen well, the author gives some conditions, among which: it is easy to rollback a feature that is not ready for the release. This is problably here that we had a problem with the 2.5 release. It should have been released on time without the problematic features, and the development should have continued normally after that. The lack of modularity of Darcs's code may explain why we are having trouble at doing this, so maybe this something we should improve for 2.8. Guillaume _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list darcs-users@darcs.net http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
