I have different experiences from past releases of the Maven project. If
an issue comes up during a release vote, for instance, that brings up a
very valid point of whether it's really kosher to fix it and continue
the vote. Most people would say - and this is the general agreement in
Maven, I think - that you're voting on a binary. This is why we've moved
toward staging, then promoting, a proposed releasable binary.
Obviously, it's not great to have 10 release candidates before a
release. I don't doubt that there's been significant burnout among the
development community WRT testing each successive RC in what is starting
to seem like an endless stream. However, it's been our experience in the
past that alpha releases don't get much attention, and beta releases
take too much of the pressure off to getting a final release out the door.
This is the second release that we've attempted the release candidate
approach, and what I've noticed is that when you get beyond the first
three or four issues discovered for that RC - not great, I know - the
testing effort drops off significantly. I'm forced to conclude it's the
level of effort, since there are issues cropping up that have been in
several release candidates now. I know, it's definitely possible that
people have a hard time keeping up with the velocity of these RCs. But
in a way, that's a good thing, because when they do have time to try it
out, they're working with the latest and greatest that we have to
offer...so as not to trip up on different permutations of the same bug.
I think there are definite downsides to all of these approaches, but
I've found the level of engagement with these last two releases to be
unprecedented since the 2.0 release.
-john
Paul Benedict wrote:
I would like to mention that Niall Pemberton, owner of Common
Beanutils, had a very good experience doing the latest builds using
RC. Each time he published an RC, he waited about 4-6 weeks to collect
feedback, patched those bugs, and released the next RC.
Are shotgun release candidates too hurtful with the growing number of
iterations? Do we need a new RC per 2-3 issues, or should they be
"released" as "beta" and then revoted on for GA quality a couple weeks
-- or even one week -- later based on community feedback.
I am thinking that if Maven moved to voting their RC builds as true
releases (yes, publishing to central repo), the iterative development
would be accepted better, and the public would be more involved. I
recommend turning each RC into a point release.
Paul
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John Casey
Developer, PMC Member - Apache Maven (http://maven.apache.org)
Blog: http://www.ejlife.net/blogs/buildchimp/
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