Hi Chris, I do appreciate your position. From our experience with Sakai, I'd say that these types of issues (blockers close to a release) often get fixed by the institutions with vested interests in upgrading production systems to a particular schedule, to the point where the release schedules sometimes get determined by who the potential early adopters are for those releases.
In the case of Matterhorn, the releases are quite close together, probably too close for sites in production to be following them (i.e. upgrading to each as released), and we don't yet have enough adopting sites for the type of resource contribution needed to support an aggressive timeframe _and_ have every release complete and comprehensively QA'd. So personally I think it might be a plus to do something like label every alternate release a developer release or preview, i.e. intended for evaluation and to showcase new features in a complete way, but not for production purposes. Sakai had a release schedule of every 6 months in the early days, and it was hard for everyone to keep up with. It was mostly driven by rapid evolution in features, which is I guess a characteristic of the early phase of big open source projects. Cheers Stephen -- Stephen Marquard, Learning Technologies Co-ordinator Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town http://www.cet.uct.ac.za Email / IM (Jabber/XMPP): [email protected] Phone: +27-21-650-5037 Cell: +27-83-500-5290 >>> Christopher Brooks <[email protected]> 8/3/2011 8:40 PM >>> Hi Stephen, > I'm not sure I follow the logic about simply removing features from > the release if there are issues with them, especially core features > like distributed deployment which are decisions made early on by > deploying sites. I was mostly suggesting this as a stick to get people to get out and fix the issue. It's assigned to no one right now. That's not awesome. > If there's a major feature and it's not working but you still want a > release, then it should be called a development snapshot or a preview > or something. I would say most of the software world would understand > that a release means that everything that worked in the previous > version continues to work unless there's a very specific plan to > deprecate and remove features over several versions, discussed in > advance with sites running the software, and with migration plans to > alternate solutions. I'd like to point out that I'm specifically harping at this issue because it is so big and people are expecting it to work. If we release 1.2 with it broken but as a "feature" that's a bad thing. And 1.2 is well overdue for release - we haven't had a working release for the last 2 months because of an issue in our official release build script. Instead, we've been getting people to download the 1.1.x branch. That's not good imo, and I want to get the 1.2 release out to fix this (and other) issues. I don't disagree that it should be a feature, and that it should be working. Who out there is willing to put resources against fixing it is my question! Chris -- Christopher Brooks, BSc, MSc ARIES Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan Web: http://www.cs.usask.ca/~cab938 Phone: 1.306.966.1442 Mail: Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems Laboratory Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan 176 Thorvaldson Building 110 Science Place Saskatoon, SK S7N 5C9 ### UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN This e-mail is subject to the UCT ICT policies and e-mail disclaimer published on our website at http://www.uct.ac.za/about/policies/emaildisclaimer/ or obtainable from +27 21 650 9111. This e-mail is intended only for the person(s) to whom it is addressed. If the e-mail has reached you in error, please notify the author. If you are not the intended recipient of the e-mail you may not use, disclose, copy, redirect or print the content. If this e-mail is not related to the business of UCT it is sent by the sender in the sender's individual capacity. ### _______________________________________________ Matterhorn mailing list [email protected] http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn To unsubscribe please email [email protected] _______________________________________________
