On 9/7/06, Pat Suwalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > David Trowbridge wrote: > > What in particular isn't possible with the 6-month cycle? > > Nothing's impossible, but a longer cycle every so often would encourage > larger and better thought-out changes. I always get the feeling that > GNOME contributors hold back on a lot of excellent ideas because they > feel it will take longer to implement properly and test than the time > they have before the next release.
This argument has never made any sense to me; I don't see why there's any truth in it. I'm not saying there isn't any, just that it does not match my experience[1] and my feelings have been quite the opposite on the matter. I've seen various arguments for longer release cycles, and perhaps we may want to move towards them at some point. The argument I personally found most convincing for a change was from Andrew Cowie. Not sure if I'll paraphrase him correctly, but basically his argument was that: We should have a stable version that is still actively supported by the time users have adopted it, and most ("mainstream") users won't adopt new versions until they've been stable for more than 6 months. Because of our 6 month release cycle and lack of ability/desire to maintain more than two releases (our current handling with 2.odd.x and 2.even.x), we effectively don't support and miss out on a lot of the feedback of many "mainstream" users. I used to be firmly in favor of the 6-month cycle, but I found Andrew's argument quite convincing and it has turned me into more of a fence sitter for now. It isn't yet clear to me that a change would be a definite improvement, let alone enough of a benefit to merit the change in the process, but that may well change. Anyway, that's my $0.02; I hope it provides a couple useful viewpoints for the discussion. Elijah [1] I've often worked on big changes that couldn't possibly make it in by the next release, including during code freezes. Sure, I can't commit it to HEAD when I'm doing so, but I can keep working on it even during hard code freeze (in branches, of course), planning it out for some later release. How many years has work on compositing gone on? I don't think a 9-12 month (or even 18 or 24) would have helped it actually get in before the "next" release, nor that the overall quality of it when it finally does get in would be any higher. _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list