On Thursday, 14 November 2013 at 00:37:38 UTC, Tyro[17] wrote:
Greetings,
I have accepted the responsibility of preparing the builds for
DMD and would like to engage in conversation about the way
ahead.
The first concern I have is about the build cycle. Presently,
it is nonexistent. There is no rhyme or reason regarding when
releases are produced. The v2.065 agenda (first attempt of its
kind) suggests that the next release will occur sometime in
March 2014. I'm of the opinion, however, that the cycle should
be six months long. This particular schedule is not of my own
crafting but I believe it to be sound and worthy of emulation:
...
Your thoughts and concerns please.
I think this is perfect. It's essentially what I would do. Ever
since Google defined their six week release schedule for Chrome,
people think quick release cycles are the next great thing. It
was such an effective marketing strategy that Firefox had to jump
the bandwagon. The truth is though, it doesn't cater well to
large corporations. That's why Firefox also has ESR (Extended
Support Release) for corporations which are older versions
maintained for longer, only being updated for new bug and
security fixes.
I think the majority of people active on these forums are
hardcore D enthusiasts so they're eager to have the latest and
greatest. However, we're not hearing the voice of those on the
outside. I'm willing to bet if we were to post this as news on
Reddit, we'd be getting praise from those who aren't actively
involved in the development of D.
I do have a few ideas:
I'm one who favors having different version numbers for beta and
stable releases. Given the version number scheme that DMD
follows, a simple numbering scheme to follow is odd- and
even-numbered versions: odd-numbered versions, starting with
2.065, would be beta, and even-numbered versions, like 2.066,
would be stable.
I would define two periods during the release cycle: Early on,
when it's okay to introduce new features and changes which may
break code, and later on when we should be concentrating on
testing, fixing bugs, and generally working towards a stable
release.
Finally, I think after every stable release, we should define an
agenda, i.e. what are our goals for the next version? My current
impression is that pull requests are incorporated into master
whenever they're deemed ready. If we have a clear agenda, then we
could collectively focus our efforts into a few areas for
development.
