Hi Chris, all, Just as a heads up we will be publishing some of the conversations we've had about a possible road map and initiatives. More in line ...
On 5/3/07, Chris Custine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Now that there is some discussion of the roadmap and feature list for the next few releases of ApacheDS, I am wondering if anyone is interested in discussing the versionin numbering and release scheduling for the next few releases?
Yeah I'm very interested in some of the points you made during the conference. There are two specific issues that come to my mind with the current
methods. First of all, with a fairly extensive and aggressive list of new features soon to show up on the roadmap, I am wondering about the viability of the odd/unstable and even/stable numbering scheme.
I'm very fond of this scheme because it allows us to tell users that interfaces and backing stores can be changed during an unstable release. This removes the need for us to make sure we're backwards compatible with previous interfaces and partition data formats. However others might not feel this is all that useful. I am thinking that it may be better to go to a flat versioning scheme with
no built in meaning, other than bug fixes releases and new feature releases.... To be clear, I am saying that 1.6, and 1.7 would both be production releases and the user would not have to know any special meaning.... 1.6.1, 1.6.2, etc. would be bug fixes, etc. The reason I suggest this is to make room for release early/release often type of releases and to make the version numbers much easier to comprehend.
Well we can release early and release often regardless of this even/odd thing. I don't think the two are coupled. Perhaps you mean releasing stable versions more often instead of being stuck in a feature release branch? Right now we hold back for months even though we release feature releases in an feature introduction branch like 1.5.x. These release are not necessarily unstable though. So perhaps we should just stop calling it unstable or even bother with feature/bugfix branches? If we combine the first idea with breaking the roadmap into smaller chunks,
we can manage the pace of change much more easily and introduce new features and enhancements without the overhead of managing the other versioning scheme and the two phase releases (unstable stable).
Not sure if there is much overhead here tho. Someone mentioned that the new scheme of releasing features with stable releases would create more overhead for maintaining and supporting these releases. Also there is the documentation nightmare of tracking which features correspond to which release. Although I must admit that I kind of liked this idea of releasing stable versions with new features these considerations scare me a bit. Mainly I am just suggesting a simplification of the version numbering and
roadmap planning to allow us to do more releases with smaller changesets while still maintaining the ability to easily to bugfixes on release branches in SVN. If we release often, merging bugfix branches into the development branch is much easier and has less merge conflict, and the version numbering change will help make that a reality. I do realize the need to have some features in the builds that we don't exactly indend for production use, but instead of letting that requirement dictate our versioning, perhaps we could label those features as experimental in the documentation or find a similar solut ion?
Yes this is an option (re: labeling certain features as experimental). Perhaps we can get more people to chime in on this. I'm torn between the two ways. Each has pros and cons. Obviously this is a big topic that is sure to start much discussion, so does
anyone else have any strong opinions on this?
Yep we need more feedback. Alex
