It's been discussed before, but maybe it is relevant for this discussion. Realize I have zero experience with release management and an incomplete understanding of everything involved, so take this for what it is worth.
I wonder if the "lieutenant" model used by Linux kernel development might be helpful here? If there was one or two people (lieutenants) responsible for each broad area of Sage, and trusted to merge patches, maybe they would be constantly/frequently moving patches into a tree that the release manager could pull from with confidence. Maybe the position of head release manager would still rotate, but the job wouldn't be so big if lots of the smaller, more self-contained patches were routinely handled by somebody else, and "all ready to go." A lieutenant could presumably always pass a patch up to the release manager if they felt it was so broad as to need a big picture look. The distributed nature of Mercurial of course supports this well, but it would be a change in philosophy to not have every patch for a release go through a single person. Of course, Sage is a complex intertwined beast, but then I'd imagine the same could be said for the kernel and it seems to work there. Perhaps others know better how well the process for the kernel works. I know Micheal Abshoff was very helpful when I got started contributing to Sage, but I'm not sure who I would turn to today if I was new to this. A lieutenant might be a recognized person to query about some corner of Sage. I suspect many of us could compose a list of candidates for lieutenants in certain areas, but it would take a newcomer a while to figure that out. And as lieutenants do some of the merging of patches, they gain some of the kind of knowledge William mentioned above about knowing just what was going to cause problems, and what might not. While I have the floor, I'll say I consider frequent releases a real plus. I think tiny incremental changes frequently is a much better process than a once-in-a-great-while mess. And I think we all like to see our contributions put into production quickly. Rob --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
