Hi Tim, On 04/04/2015 06:30 AM, Tim Graham wrote: > Now that Django 1.8 is released, I wanted to bump this thread for > discussion so we can hopefully ratify this schedule or modify it based > on feedback. In particular, I heard a concern that a six month release > schedule may be too often for the community. On the other hand, I think > smaller releases would make incremental upgrades easier.
In practice I'm not sure that "smaller releases make incremental upgrades easier" pans out consistently. Shai pointed out that in large organizations the simple fact of an upgrade is often a bureaucratic hurdle apart from technical considerations; I'd say even in more nimble organizations, simply needing to set aside developer time for an upgrade is a fixed cognitive cost that "weighs" (in user perception) at least as much as the technical difficulty of performing the upgrade itself. I also think there's a benefit in smaller releases and getting features to users quicker. I'm not sure where the sweet spot is (or if there even is one). FWIW, (per http://railsapps.github.io/rails-release-history.html) Rails' last five gaps were 12 months (3.0 to 3.1), 5 months (3.1 to 3.2), 17 months (3.2 to 4.0), 11 months (4.0 to 4.1), and 8 months (4.1 to 4.2). Not a lot of consistency there, but six months seems on the short end for a comparable project. Six month release cycles, plus a last-two-versions security-support policy, implies that non-LTS users need to plan on at minimum yearly upgrades (where they'd upgrade two versions at once). How much harder is that than planning on releases every 18 months? It seems to me that if either one of those is problematic for your organization, that means you should be sticking with LTS releases; that's what they're for, after all. (This may go without saying, but if we feel that asking people to upgrade yearly is too much, I think it's much better to lengthen the release cycle than to try to add security support for one more non-LTS version. Security releases are hard enough to get out the door as-is.) Carl -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/5522D303.6060700%40oddbird.net. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
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