On Thursday, July 26, 2012 08:35:26 Jacob Carlborg wrote: > > I don't think a rigid release schedule has ever worked in software > > development. Linus is world-renowned for releasing at what looks like > > utterly random intervals and I know of very little software that ships > > on a strict time based cadence. It almost ALWAYS slips for some reason > > or the other. > > > > I guess my point is that it isn't as easy as making the schedule the > > final arbiter because it is an attempt to deny that the real world > > exists. What if Walter is on vacation (I don't know if he believes in > > vacations but, bear with me) during release week? What then? Do we > > demand that he organize is life around our precious release schedule? > > You can at least come to an official agreement that we should release on > a given interval. Then we don't need to stop the world to make that > happened. Sometimes it will be delayed and that would be acceptable. If > we do have a release schedule and Walter, for example, knows he will be > on vacation during the release week. We can plan ahead and annoyance > that the next release will be delayed or skipped. > > > Also, what about projects that absolutely cannot be completed in under X > > weeks? Do we just leave the code in the release, half working, waiting > > to spread all KINDS of bugs? > > No, no, no. That's another problem. Don't commit anything to > upstream/master that isn't finished. I don't know why Walter does that. > Does he not have his own fork? Why not create a new branch at least?
There are a number of things that we could do to improve our release process - a number of them revolving around taking proper advantage of git (though not all) - but actually effecting those kind of changes has been incredibly difficult as Don has pointed out. So, while there are a number of things that we _could_ do (and probably _should_ do), the fact that Walter has agreed to this scheme with dlang-stable is actually _huge_. It may help open the door to other changes to the release process (like branching for a beta). AFAIK, Walter never branches for _anything_, though maybe he does have branches of some kind on his computer. - Jonathan M Davis