This is a new thread, building on the thread that Mikhail started, to
get away from some of the shoals we encountered.
I'd like to propose we start a formal release schedule :
* Monthly releases, targeted for the last day of each
month. (IOW, avoid the April 1 release)
* For some set of platforms that we support
* Regression free (if we support an app or feature in release X,
we support it in X+1 unless we agree in a vote to
regress).
A lot of good things will come from starting down this road :
1) We can start putting together the process to decide on "code
freeze", building and testing, etc.
2) This will allow us to do JIRA triage that is meaningful - we can
pre-set the releases in JIRA, and bucket the JIRAs into the release
buckets
3) We can chart out what we want to do in Wiki (and then harvest for
the site) what we hope to accomplish in each release. Up to now, the
roadmap was very high-level, and for the most part, we've been
amazingly good at following it (especially considering it was a SWAG
done in response to a question I got on a concall once...) I would
love to see us chart out the remainder of the API, some sense of VM
feature (like "switch to GCv5"), and a set of apps we plan to have
running.
An important element to this will be naming. I think that as we're
just figuring this out, we should avoid date-oriented names (like
"March", "April"...) so we can shift the schedule as need be. While
I like the "M1, M2, M3" scheme, I personally utterly detest the "1.0-
M1" approach, as it ties your hands horribly. I think that we should
avoid prefixing a version number for now, and use version numbers
when we get the JCK and can plan out a 0.5, 0.6, 0.7... to 1.0 train
So it could be
Apache Harmony Pre M1
Apache Harmony Pre M2
Apache Harmony Pre M3
...
for now. This is really common and banal. Boring....
We're building on the shoulders of giants here, and I think it would
be nice to honor those that came before us. Here's a list of great
people in the history of Java who I'd love to honor, as many are my
heros :
1) "Hamilton" (Graham, The Enforcer)
2) "Bloch" (Josh, API hero)
3) "Gafter" (Neil, API hero)
4) "Bracha" (Gilad, VM hero)
5) "Click" (Cliff Click, hotspot hero)
6) "Gingel" (Rob, Chief Engineer, and guy who grokked OSS)
7) "Detlefs" (David, GC hero)
8) "Lindholm" (Tim, VM spec guy)
9) "Yellin" (Frank, VM spec guy)
Thoughts? Comments? Flames?
geir
