The Evolution team is considering moving from our traditional 6 month release cycle to a 12 month release cycle starting next March, and is soliciting feedback from the user community.
This is partly motivated by the team's desire for a longer development window in which to merge and test major changes, but moreover it's to provide better support to the user community. The team's manpower is still severely limited to where we can only realistically support one stable branch at a time and still manage to get any kind of significant development work done for the next major release. The problem is -- even for distros that also make semi-annual releases like Fedora and Ubuntu -- because of the lag between an upstream release and a distro release, users are often upgrading to an Evolution release that's either near the end of its upstream support window or is already abandoned by developers. That's frustrating for everyone. Developers want everyone using the latest (and in our opinion, best) release, and users don't like waiting until their next distro upgrade to get their Evolution issues resolved. So to compensate, the proposal is basically to make a major release annually instead of semi-annually, and to support each release for 12 months instead of 6. That gives users a better chance to sync up with developers for at least half the year, and hopefully get their issues resolved quicker. We intend to synchronize our annual major release with GNOME's spring release, and continue releasing stable updates and development snap- shots throughout the year at the same pace as we do currently: about once a month for each branch. So we'll still hold to the "release early, release often" principle. You can peek at the developer thread on this starting from here: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-hackers/2013-July/msg00004.html There seems to be a consensus in favor of this policy change on the developer side, although we're still working out the finer details of scheduling, versioning, etc. What do you guys think? Would this be helpful? Matthew Barnes _______________________________________________ evolution-list mailing list [email protected] To change your list options or unsubscribe, visit ... https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
