On 19/08/2011, at 9:16 AM, Hani Suleiman wrote: > Is there any kind of timeline for the next release?
We hope to get a 1.0-milestone-5 out in the next week or two, once we have fixes for the worst of the breakages in milestone-4. > > I don't want to be one of those 'is it out yet' people, but the botched m4 > release has left things somewhat confused. > > The website lists m4, and I think up until a few days ago some items pointed > to m4 docs, and some to m3. Right now it looks like this has been cleaned up > though and everything points to m3. > > The downside of course is that the m4 documentation (for those foolish enough > to have upgraded) is nowhere to be found (at least, I'm unable to find it > from a cursory glance). There's also no documentation on the website at all > about the fact that m4 was silently withdrawn or found to be unusable, nor is > there anything that encouraged people not to use it. > > Obviously releases go wrong sometimes (well, not often, but I guess it can > happen). Usually this is followed very quickly with a fixed release, but it'd > been over a week now with no updates that are visible to the casual user. I'm > subscribed to this list, follow the twitter feed, and check the website, and > am unable to get any sense of comfort from any of those. This is the first time we've had to withdraw a release. I guess we need some practise, to get better at it. Normally, we'd just fix the issues and do a new release. This time we haven't been able to, given the nature of the change. So, in the spirit of getting better at withdrawing a release: The website now has links to the milestone-4 downloads and documentation, with some disclaimers about the release being broken. > > I really like gradle, and I don't want to be a doom and gloom kind of person, > but I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone right now (based > purely on the glacial pace of releases for a tool that clearly still has a > lot of active development and exciting plans). We want to get better at this. The plan was to release something every 4 weeks. Various things got in the way between milestone-3 and milestone-4 to throw the plan out of whack. There're a few things we've done to address this. Hopefully this will make you feel better about recommending Gradle to people. First, we're now in bug-fixing mode, to get ready for 1.0. Once we have some fixes for the dependency management problems, we can do a milestone-5, and then churn out releases every couple of weeks after that. We've automated more of the release process, so that we pretty much do a practise release every day. This means we can release much more easily at any time. Plus we've much faster CI machines, so we get the feedback faster. We're using some branching so we can stabilising a release while work continues in the main branch. Using 'milestone-n' as a versioning scheme was a mistake, because we don't have a way to distinguish between low risk releases like milestone-3, and the potentially unstable ones such as milestone-4. Once we get back to regular version numbering post-1.0, we can label the unstable releases as 'rc' or 'beta' or 'experimental' or whatever. -- Adam Murdoch Gradle Co-founder http://www.gradle.org VP of Engineering, Gradleware Inc. - Gradle Training, Support, Consulting http://www.gradleware.com
