On Mar 7, 2013, at 12:04 , Dirkjan Ochtman <[email protected]> wrote:
> (warning, grumpy rant forthcoming...) Oh, and thanks for speaking your mind, and being patient with us. Your contributions are very much appreciated! :) Jan -- > > On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Noah Slater <[email protected]> wrote: >> Thoughts? > > It seems to me that a lot of this hinges on releases. Releases > generate publicity and therefore developer interest, thus developer > engagement. Releases make sure that work developers do gets into > user's hands soon. > > CouchDB, and I am sorry to have been banging this drum for a few years > now, is the worst open source project at doing releases I know. > > Here's a quote from this list, from February 13: > >> I plan to cut a release candidate from the 1.3.x branch this weekend. > > And another, from Nov 13: > >> when we set out to ship 1.3.0, we thought the cors and docs >> branches were just around the corner. That was a couple of >> weeks ago. We are just starting with this, but the whole >> idea of time-based releases is that we do not wait for >> feature branches to be ready. >> >> I’d like to propose that we ignore everything we’ve said >> before and do the following: >> >> - ship 1.3.0 as reflected in the 1.3.x branch now. > > Here's another, from October 23: > >> It's been a while since we released and I want to change this now. I >> propose making a 1.3.x branch from today's master >> (66529378dd06342929e04772370f3509cbe786a5) and building 1.3.0 there. > > Another, from June 16: > >> 1. We'd like to proposed formal time-based releases > > Et cetera. As an example, the EventSource bits, which are actually > something which would be very useful for us at work, were committed to > the tree on May 16. They are yet to be released. > > I feel a bit hypocritical for saying all this, since I don't > contribute much to core CouchDB (although I did do a bunch of the doc > conversion, try to be helpful around the edges and maintain > couchdb-python). The reason for this is mostly that I thoroughly > dislike Erlang as a language, and have no intention of learning it > just to help out with CouchDB. I did some Futon work back in the day, > but had lots of trouble getting it committed since no one's really > owned Futon for a while (and right now, it looks like other people > have that bit covered, though they're using a modern but also quite > complex development stack that will make it unlikely for a lowly > back-end web developer dude like me to be able to contribute much). > > So, IMNSH and annoyingly harsh O, stop talking so much about how to > energize the project, and Just. Ship. It. Every month, preferably. Fix > the test suite and whatever else makes it so damn hard to release. > Insert story here about that dude who realized people were trying to > fix the wrong problem [1]. > > End of rant, cheers, > > Dirkjan > > [1] http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/
