MCBastos wrote:
Interviewed by CNN on 15/07/2011 10:41, hawker told the world:
This is not a flame, I've rewritten it twice to reduce personal criticism. It's
just how I see the new model;.
2) I'm just curious about versioning. Perhaps I just don't understand
fully what changed. From what I understand 2.1 has a decent number of
changes. It perhaps should have been 2.5 not 2.1. But what I don't
understand is I thought 2.2 was 2.1 with bug fixes. It came out very
fast after 2.1. Why is 2.2 not 2.1.1 or some such? What major changes
under the hood happened?
OK. The Mozilla organization recently changed the update philosophy,
from a traditional development model to what has been nicknamed the
"rapid-release train." Seamonkey, while strictly speaking is not part of
the Mozilla organization, is closely related to it and highly dependent
on the Firefox and Thunderbird projects. Therefore, it went along,
partly because it's easier to sync efforts if both are in the same model.
I have compared in the past the two development models to the publishing
business: the traditional model is akin to writing a reference textbook,
where you spend a long time researching the new edition while your
publisher releases new printings of the old edition with minor updates
and corrections for typos.
The rapid-release train is more like publishing a periodical reference
guide, such as a restaurant guide (perhaps the sort some newspapers give
away every month) -- you don't expect it to be entirely rewritten every
month, but there are always SOME changes. And you don't go back to press
to correct typos on the May edition either, since the June edition will
be ready pretty soon.
Essentially, the rapid-release train does away with the distinction
between "major" and "minor" versions -- it's somewhat in the middle:
every release there's some improvement, and every release there are
bugfixes too.
From my view, in every release there are new features, improvements and
bugfixes haven't come to my attention. I like a model where eventually you
release something fully functional.
There's also the cathedral-and-bazaar philosophies involved. The
traditional model was developed for "cathedral" organizations, and
carries with it some of the old assumptions -- that having all the
changes released in a big lump is better than giving them out one at a
time (this is specially attractive for commercial software companies,
since big changes help enticing the customer into paying for upgrade
fees), that distribution of new versions is slow and expensive, and so on.
I think for this model the spelling you want is bizarre.
But Mozilla is a collective, free (in both senses) software project. The
"bazaar" approach is probably a better model of what is really
happening. And one of the maxims of the bazaar model is "release early,
release often." And that's what's happening now.
As for the version numbers themselves... they become pretty meaningless,
despite the obvious (higher is newer). There are no clear distinctions
between "major" and "minor" versions. Mozilla and Chrome went with
"major" versions numbering, Seamonkey went with "minor" numbering, and
some organizations use a somewhat-hybrid "year.month" numbering (which
I, personally, think is the sanest long-term scheme).
Third-level version numbers (x.x.1) are still used sometimes, for what
Mozilla calls a "chemspill" release (and Seamonkey calls an "oilspill")
-- a fix for a bug so serious it CANNOT wait for the next cycle. But
those are special cases, not to be considered in the normal release
schedule.
If you don't consider address book being broken to be pouring the chamber pot in
the cistern, could you give an example of just how broken something would have
to be before it gets fixed?
I admit I'm more offended by the fact that you don't consider the address book
debacle or the reported offline imap deleting hundreds of messages serious
enough to be fixed than by the fact that there is not QA, after years of working
things becoming broken I assume user testing of beta versions is the only
testing there is.
As for your more specific question, "why is it 2.2 instead of 2.1.1.?"
Well, yes, the Seamonkey part of it was mostly bugfixes. However, the
underlying Gecko engine (which comes from Mozilla) has new features,
which are listed on the Release Notes. So, Seamonkey gets those new
features too. So it's a valid version increment.
As long as the really important things like version number are correct...
I have a bet with someone here that the reaction to my post will be a personal
attack on my tone, accusations of being a whiner, and no corrective response to
the issues I raised.
--
Bill Davidsen <david...@tmr.com>
We are not out of the woods yet, but we know the direction and have
taken the first step. The steps are many, but finite in number, and if
we persevere we will reach our destination. -me, 2010
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