On 25/10/2010 14:47, Marco van de Voort wrote:
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 02:10:17PM +0100, Paulo Costa wrote:
That kind of reasoning leads to longer times between releases and
progressively becomes worse: You don't want to release because you want
more tests before but, as releasing become increasingly a greater
effort, you do it less often.
Well, I think you dehumanize the developers that are currently doing the
job. It is not like they are braindead droids that can only work this way.
Not at all. It was just a warning to a possible and very _human_
reaction that can lead to a lower frequency of releases.
Worse, the bigger delays between releases worsen the creeping bugs that
will surface when the release is exposed to a different crowd.
There is some truth in this, but that is a chicken and egg situation. If new
versions are not adopted for a while because each time a differnet little
thing makes it unusable for a certain group, you end up with multiple groups
clinging to old "golden" releases.
Yes, but at least it their choice not to use a more modern release.
Probably, the bulk of the users would jump to the latest version. That
would give more "testers" than the current trunk can ever get. (Provided
that there are real improvements: more features/less bugs from release
to release)
A release will remain a lot of effort. The building and platform
coordination is what takes time, not the VCS work.
Some maintainers might be incommunicado for several weeks. Holiday periods
are difficult for the same reasons. (which is partially why 2.4.2 is so
delayed, july-august nothing happened)
This cycle can certainly get broken, e.g. by multiple maintainers per
target, and not only doing release engineering around release periods.
But that needs new blood, and the question is simple: who in this thread has
ever built a release? A whole release (so installer, or rpm/deb and tried to
get it accepted by Fedora/Debian etc).
THAT's where the bottleneck is. The branches etc work is one afternoon.
An heretic thought: Why should a release be made to all platforms at
once? The release cycle could be different for different platforms...
Paulo Costa
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