On 06/16/2012 09:44 PM, Inge Wallin wrote:
My problem is with the second. While some people always want to have the
latest and greatest, I wonder what it will do to stability. You didn't write
anything above about how many bugfix updates any given version would receive.
The shorter the release cycles, the fewer the number of bugfix releases. If
not, we would have to maintain several active branches at the same time, which
would increase overhead a lot. Somebody else mentioned translations, which is
another related issue.
The reasoning behind the move towards shorter release cycles is exactly the
opposite of how large organizations reason when they select software. Remember
the outcry when Firefox went to its current way of releasing. When Brazil
rolls out KDE to 24 million users, they don't want to have to update that
every 2-4 months.
It seems to me that a current trend in larger free software projects is to go
to a 6-9 month release schedule with a kind of "Long Term Support" release
once in a while (every 2 years?). If we shorten the release cycles (an idea
which I am actually not that fond of) then could we also consider to have an
LTS release now and then?
+1 from a user who's also more interested in bug fixes and stability
than quickly releasing new features. It would very nice to have some LTS
code that's maintained and bug fixed for a longer period of time.
Just one perspective from a user lurking on the list.
-Ben
