A few misc comments in partial response to some of the interesting comments posted in this thread:
* I initially proposed a release every 6 months but a release every 12 (as many of you have proposed) is totally fine to me; the important aspect here is that we agree on a time based release (instead of a feature based one) and that we agree on the strategy of officially release every year (not just creating a candidate release) * when I wrote that the trunk is more stable than an old release I meant to say that the project's code, the framework, and the application are enhanced and improved over time the new bugs introduced are usually fixed in a rather short period; for this reason, it is true that there is a chance that this week the trunk could be less stable than the last week, but the chances that the trunk is less stable than one year ago are lower; this is my impression btw and I could be wrong * we will fail if we think that we can guarantee that a release will have (free of charge) services to upgrade from older releases, documentation etc... we have to be realistic and pragmatic and we cannot ask to the committers to do more than what they are doing Kind regards, Jacopo On Feb 15, 2010, at 11:49 AM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote: > I know this subject has been already discussed several times in the past, but > I still would like to rethink our strategy for releases in OFBiz. > I am under the impression that, considering the release branch 9.04, that is > our latest release branch: > * there are more users than maintainers > * because of this, no real maintenance plan, test strategy etc.. has been > created around it from the community of users and interested parties (in fact > we were not really able to officially release it) > * a lot of new users start eveluating OFBiz from that instead of the trunk > * it is rather old, several new features are missing and also code > improvements (that could fix bugs etc) > * because of this, it tends to be less stable than the trunk > > The main cons of this situations are the following: > 1) not real interest in maintaining a release branch means that we will not > be able to spend time on it and officially release it: the OFBiz community > will miss the advantage of using the marketing channel represented by a new > release > 2) new users will get the wrong impression that the project is slowing > improving if they just get the releases > 3) it is much easier for a user to stay up to date with the trunk rather than > with a release: I mean that there is no guarantee that one day someone will > build an upgrade plan from the old release to the new one... users of the old > release may be left behind forever > > What I suggest is based on the following assumptions: > 1) community is not ready or interested in maintaining releases > 2) new users prefer to start evaluating OFBiz with a release instead of the > trunk > 3) it is good for the project to announce new releases often > 4) because our current policies (slowly increasing number of committers, peer > reviews, etc...) our trunk is (and will be) more stable than older releases > > Here is what I suggest: > A) define an official release plan that says that we officially issue a > release every approx 6 months (just to give you an idea): since there is no > way to define a set of features that will go in the next release, our > releases will be based on dates instead of features; but of course we can > discuss the exact time of a release based on what is going on 1-2 weeks > before the release date > B) there is no guarantee that patches will be backported to releases, that > upgrade scripts will be created from release to release > > It is true that the ASF policies ask that a release, that represents the code > that is distributed by the ASF to the larger audience of users, is a "stable" > deliverable; but if we continue with the current approach, even if it is > intended to get a stable and maintained release, what we are really doing is > distributing the code in the trunk (this is what we suggest our users to use > instead of the release), not the "stable" release. > > What do you think? > > Jacopo > > >
