Some more thoughts about milestone builds... For a variety of reasons, making a final and official release can take months. This can make life difficult for developers who are trying to roll out new features on a monthly basis. And it provides limited opportunities for folks to test new features as they are developed. Sure, anybody can create a build at any time and test it, but if that build is not tagged they have no fixed target against which to report bugs.
To solve these problems, I'm proposing that we start the practice of making "milestone" builds available. A milestone build should be made after a significant chunk of development work as been done. This could happen several times during the development of new version of Roller, perhaps once a month but never more often than once a month. * Tagged in SVN * Released informally via people.apache.org * Intended only for testing * NOT an official release * NOT supported by migration scripts, etc. So, question #1 is: is this a good idea, i.e. does it solve the problems I identified and should those problems be solved. And question #2 is will it work, i.e. does ASF policy allow milestone builds as described above. And can we streamline the voting process so that it does not take months to also get a milestone release out. How can we streamline the process? One way is to NOT require a formal vote for milestone buildand instead just use lazy consensus. Once we start requiring a vote, we can get into long delays. But will that fly with ASF policy? Another way is to make the milestone builds automatic, i.e. decide that we spin a tagged build on the 1st of every month. Any ideas? - Dave
