On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 16:19 -0400, Michael Peters wrote: > We also need to think about deprecation cycles. If you deprecate a > feature in 1 version and then it disappears in the next then the time > between when my code works and when it doesn't is only 6 months. Some > distros provide support for several years.
Which reminds me: chromatic, what was your reasoning for major releases being every three months, instead of four or six? I agree we don't want to go much beyond six months for our major releases, but with at least two major distros that aim for decent freshness (Ubuntu and Fedora) using six month release cycles, I'm curious what we gain with a shorter cycle than that. A six month release cycle makes deprecation-and-removal a one year affair, which isn't too bad. And we can fairly tell users who want more stability than that to use the "slow distro" that matches each "fast distro" we aim for -- Debian instead of Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS instead of Fedora, for example. (Separately, I agree that one month point releases seem to work well for us. I don't see any reason to change that.) -'f
