Matthew, On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Matthew Barnes <mbar...@redhat.com> wrote: > I've been kicking around this idea for awhile now, but haven't said > anything until now. I'm putting it out there as food for thought. > > Increasingly I'm feeling like the traditional 6-month release cycle is > just too short for Evolution. In terms of development, we have a pretty > short window for landing major changes and allowing adequate time for > testing before development freezes set in. > > But more importantly, our users seem to be constantly playing catch-up > in terms of supported releases. Because of the delay between upstream > releases and distro releases, by the time users finally upgrade to a > newer Evolution, more often than not they're upgrading to a version > that's either nearing the tail end of its 6-month support window or is > already unsupported. > > That's frustrating, both for users and for me as a developer, but we > just don't have the manpower to support multiple stable releases and > still get any kind of significant development work done. > > I'd like us to consider moving to a 12-month release cycle, which would > sync up with GNOME's release schedule annually instead of semi-annually. > > Here's my initial proposal, if you guys are open to this: > > * Continue with the 6-month releases through the end of the year, just > because I think we need more lead time for such a major policy change. > > * Bump Evolution's major version number to split away from GNOME's > semi-annual release numbering. Call the upcoming March 2014 release > Evolution 4.0 (or perhaps even Evolution 2014... I'm open to ideas). > > * We would follow GNOME's string change announcement and freeze schedule > in the months leading up to each March release. > > * We would continue releasing stable updates and development snapshots > at a steady pace. Our release schedule could even be more predictable > than it is now. We could do, for example, stable releases on the 1st > Monday of each month and development snapshots on the 3rd Monday. > > Obviously there's more details to figure out, but I like the precedent > we've set with the 3.8 branch, and I think our users appreciate it too. > > My feeling is just that at this point in the project's lifespan, our > users would be better served by a longer support window. They still > want to see improvements and new features, but more than anything I > think they just want stability and to see their bugs fixed without > waiting half a year. > > It's just an idea. What do you guys think? > > Matt >
I also fully agree with your suggestion. As we have discussed, users are reporting bugs against 3.8.x now and they will need to wait at least 6 months before they get a fix in 3.10.x. I mean, from the stability point of view it would be great if we have a larger window to work, test and correct our mistakes.. Best Regards, -- Fabiano Fidêncio _______________________________________________ evolution-hackers mailing list evolution-hackers@gnome.org To change your list options or unsubscribe, visit ... https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
