Elijah Newren wrote: > [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.
There's a good reason for this really; no matter how long you make the cycle, if you allow people to commit stuff to HEAD that essentially disassembles the engine and leaves parts all over the floor, you have a big problem - nobody else on the team can get anything done because they can't dogfood HEAD in order to work on their own changes. (cf. pre-GNOME-2.0 for an example of when this happened a lot...) So, there's a reality that HEAD has to always be roughly working since lots of people are trying to work with it. Given that reality, a longer cycle essentially does nothing to make it easier to make large changes, because a branch is required due to dogfooding, not due to the short cycle. Re: the overall discussion, a couple points I'd highlight: - perhaps the largest penalty for exceeding a 6-month cycle is that distribution vendors start maintaining their own substantial forks because they can't count on having HEAD in released form. - I don't think something like Topaz is even worth considering unless the community can figure out how to decide on some of the focus / target audience questions I've annoyingly raised ;-) if those aren't answered you end up doing the "petrified wood rewrite" (cf. http://log.ometer.com/2005-04.html) where it cleans up the code but you pretty much have the same thing as before. Just a .02 Havoc _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
