On 3/22/07, Alex Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I remember a while ago some people were talking about how it might be a > good idea to dedicate a release cycle to fixing bugs, with a feature > freeze in effect. > > Is there anyone still in support of this idea, or has it been generally > discarded?
I don't think the idea would work well; in fact, we've rejected similar ideas that were far less imposing in the past[1]. The reasons are perhaps easiest to understand if we changed the wording of your suggestion just slightly: Let's say we declared that only bugfixing was allowed for a cycle. This declaration would mean that no new features could be developed, no translations could be added, no more user documentation could be written, and work on the webpages would need to stop. You might get a few more bug fixers due to manually altering priorities of those that have multiple interests and abilities but you'll have far more people who just quit working for a cycle. Overall, you'd get much less work going into GNOME. In the past, this reasoning was used to reject even making an official pre-declared _focus_ for a cycle, let alone restricting work to _only_ be done in a given focus area. (See e.g. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-March/msg00415.html) That's not to say that focusing on a particular activity is bad, just that getting people to focus on a pet topic needs to be done in a different way[2]. Cheers, Elijah [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-March/msg00415.html [2] I think the better way to get increased efforts on a given topic is to start working on them, convincing others to join you, and letting others know of results you are getting. At one end, this can be like the performance work which seemed to be galvanized into higher gear by Federico's blogs on the topic (specifically starting with the file chooser). At the other, it can be as simple as gathering a couple people on IRC and working on fixing particular bugs (e.g. Kjartan has started showstopper-fixing hackfests on IRC just by grabbing people he saw in channels he was in and talking them into working on some bugs with him; I remember one day where a few of us (including Kjartan) fixed a small handful of high profile bugs at his prompting). Another alternative for increasing focus on a particular topic is to have individual maintainers choose to follow them for their project. I have basically imposed feature freezes on myself for an entire development cycle for certain modules that I maintained, simply because I felt it was the right focus for my project at the time. _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
