Hi all, let me share with you some thoughts. I know that this community likes a lot the strategy "release soon, release often"; I tend to like this as well. What I don't like, altogether, is the chance to have once in a while a quite buggy release on our way, which is, in my opinion, not unlikely with this strategy. Some examples are when big new features are introduced, like new symbolics, new notebook, new whatever else. From one point of view, having the current official release providing the brand new features, is useful in term of bug tracking (they are discovered much faster). On the other hand, if people are not intending to help and join the community, but just try testing a piece of software, they could get really annoyed by finding more or less trivial bugs (lots of them can pass not caught by a very careful review!) and make very bad advertisement. At the end of the day, provided that the community would keep releasing this way, why don't you also consider providing a "Conservative" release? That should simply represent a release where most (or the total amount) of the work is focused on fixing bugs, regressions, and known issues, rather than providing new features. I know this already happens once in a while, but I think that those release are simply not valued enough! That could be released in many ways: one every six months, one per year, also whenever it's ready can be a very good choice. For example, from my point of view (my knowledge is limited) 3.4.2 has been a pretty reliable release, all the efforts were in fixing stuff before getting the brand new 4.0. Another conservative release will probably be the 4.2, where the new symbolic stuff is already quite integrated and the new notebook will get a good finishing after the feedbacks from the 4.1.2 (also the backward compatibility break of the sws format has been restored, I think, which is good). So, the amount of time from two very casual conservative releases has been around 6 months, which is reasonable for productive oriented environments. In this way, first time users could be pointed to the conservative release, and once they get hungry and wants to get their hands dirty, they won't have problems in switching to the current release. This would also allow people that are very interested in short term results, to work with a fairly reliable release, rather than fearing that something goes wrong because of a simple bug, and discovering it just one day before the deadline (if not worse!).
I hope this will be useful to the community. Best regards Maurizio --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
