Si Chen wrote:
Hi everybody -I'm really glad we will be doing a release for OFBIZ again. Here are a things I would really like to see -1. A release which is on a separate SVN branch with a stable set of features, so the incremental releases will be bug fixes that produce more stable versions, which would imply:2. That we can coordinate between all the major developers, including the committers and any other code contributors, of a feature freeze date for doing a release.
With #1 we don't need #2. There is no reason to do a feature freeze, and I don't think the organization of OFBiz is such that trying to do so will be reasonable. Once a branch is created the procedure from there on out is to merge over important bug fixes from the trunk, and fix bugs that aren't in the trunk right in the branch. Those should be the ONLY two changes going into the branch. Doing it that way once the branch is created it is automatically a "feature freeze" and so that is not needed in the trunk. The only time where there might be issues is the period between a release candidate and the final release, but we can address that by starting the branch for the RC? releases and each RC? will correspond to a revision in the branch. The final release will also correspond to a revision in the branch, as will post-final releases based on bugs fixed over time. So, all we really need is volunteers to fix bugs in the release branches. Doing this job is a LOT of work for a project with the size and regular changes of OFBiz. This is why we do not follow the release early and often approach. If we have too many branches for releases they simply will not be maintained and so that release might as well be an SVN rev number on a sticky note as none of the benefits of a release will apply. BTW, I'm moving this discussion (starting with this reply) to the ofbiz-dev list. Please reply there for this and other messages in this thread (ie let's move the thread over as this should be a public discussion). -David
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