On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 11:40 AM, Jori Mäntysalo <jori.mantys...@uta.fi> wrote: > On Mon, 17 Oct 2016, Erik Bray wrote: > >> I'm mostly just talking about a policy that generates a (rough) >> release schedule. > > > OK, so you mean something like Fedora release, where it was decided about > half a year ago that version 25 will be out at 2016-11-08 (and that was > later changed to 2016-11-15). > > In principle doable. It would mean that Volker won't change beta to rc until > some predefined date, and will make the change unless there is a very good > reason to release still one beta.
Something like that, yes. It doesn't even have to be that precise--experience shows that beta testing/release candidates can hold things up if they expose major issues. One way to deal with that is to estimate, based on experience, how long release testing typically takes (one can even go back through history and get some quantitative evidence for this). Another is to not set exact release dates, but do set dates for cutting off the main branch to a release branch, where from that point forward only fixes will be merged (it's good to make a branch so that normal development can continue in the main branch in the meantime). Regardless, for the dates, it is still very useful to set rough estimates based on a policy like you described. This helps contributors plan how to target work they wish to contribute to a particular release. Sage is fortunate that it is not commercial software and doesn't have paying customers (like RedHat does) who expect things at specific times. But we can still do better to communicate a plan--this can help making the software itself more stable too. Here's an example of a release plan I helped develop for Astropy: https://github.com/astropy/astropy-APEs/blob/master/APE2.rst It isn't set in stone--it's been amended once or twice since its inception as we gained experience with how well previous versions of the plan were working. But for the most part it's been quite stable. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
