Having been release manager for several past Qt feature releases (4.5 to 4.7), 
I'm wary of setting a single feature freeze date and having a big rush to cram 
all the new features into the master branch in the last couple of days before 
the deadline.  Instead, I would like to see a staggered delivery of features, 
where each large change is tested, merged and tested some more before the gate 
is opened for the next big change.

For the Qt 4.5.0 and 4.6.0 releases, we did the former, and in both cases the 
last minute rush to push in all the new features caused substantial breakage 
and significantly delayed the alpha and beta releases.  For Qt 4.6, it took two 
weeks after the feature freeze date to get the branch compiling again on all 
the Tier 1 platforms (that was the criteria for an alpha release) and several 
months to satisfy the (fairly lax) quality criteria for a beta release.

For the Qt 4.7.0 release, we staggered the merging of new features over several 
weeks and had a much better result, with alpha release packages building 
successfully on the day after the feature freeze.

--
Jason McDonald
QTestLib Maintainer
_______________________________________________
Development mailing list
Development@qt-project.org
http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development

Reply via email to