Am 03.02.2011 22:39, schrieb Antoine Pitrou: > Le jeudi 03 février 2011 à 09:01 +0100, Georg Brandl a écrit : >> I don't think branching off at beta1 is helpful. Developers will happily >> continue adding features to trunk (because that's what's fun, isn't it), >> and not care much about the release branch. Obviously we want the opposite, >> and we want them to concentrate on bug fixing. > > I'm obviously not in a position to judge, but I find it interesting that > you're arguing precisely for what the article says is better abandoned > (according, apparently, to a numerical study of community activity):
Well, I hope that nobody thinks the article to be eternal truth that can't be argued about. I also haven't read it yet, so I'm just stating what I think. > Graph analysis showed very clearly that every time we would > freeze, the community would shrink drastically and it would take > several months after we un-froze for the size of the community > to recover. It happened uniformly, every single time we would > freeze, over many years and many releases. > > [...] > > We addressed this issue by *never* freezing the trunk. [...] We > are also doing feature development on the trunk *simultaneously* > with those bug fixes. However, we’ve found that not only does > the community expand more rapidly this way, but we also actually > get our releases out more quickly than we used to. So it’s a > win-win situation. It's unclear to me what is meant here by "the community would shrink". The amount of core developers certainly doesn't shrink during feature freezes, from what I've experienced. Those who are active before remain active, those who contribute sporadically don't really care. But as Barry says, this is all a bit different with DVCS, and everyone is welcome to develop new features in their own branches. I still think that -- even if only for workload reasons -- the official trunk should be closed to features during beta-rc phases. Georg _______________________________________________ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
