On Sun, Mar 02, 2008 at 09:06:48AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > I think we should shorten our stable-release interval to 6 months.
Personally I think the current cycle of about one year is rather nice. A release costs quite some resources for final polishing. Which means the effective time for developing new features will be reduced. > (In retrospect, I think it was in > a stagnant period when I joined -- and I think the commit-frequency > graphs on Ohloh confirm this.) I think the available time for most developers fluctuates quite a lot, at least it does for me. > Late last year I lost some initial members of my UI test group simply > because 1.4 was too far in the future to sustain their interest -- > they weren't going to get to see the fruits of their labor soon > enough, lost motivation, and drifted away. (This is what specifically > started me thinking our release interval is a problem.) I see that as a problem, but I fear that we get the opposite with short cycles. Devs losing interest since there's not enough time to implement features and they spend too much time polishing for a release. I *do* like new releases and also to polish them, but I like coding new features much more. > 2 July -> 2 Aug: Feature freeze, bug stomping, translations > > 2 Aug: 1.6 release If we get accepted for SoC this is impossible since the end date for SoC is the 18th of Augustus. Personally I think this might be a nice point to do a bug stomp party. > I think 1.6 will actually be in a better state if we shorten the cycle > and stick to less ambitious feature goals in 1.5. (This doesn't mean any > of them would need to be abandoned, just postponed to 1.7.) I *do* look forward to work on some of the ambitious features I have planned. I'm already did some things for them so I really want to work on them. > Finally, I think our long release interval has been meshing badly with the > timing of Linux distribution releases. While I consider this a minor point > relative to my previous ones, I think it is not insignificant. I'm not following the release schedules of distros but I think it's impossible, regardless of the cycle length, to 'get it right' for all distros. It might even cause some slower distros to be a full cycle behind. Regards, Mark de Wever aka Mordante/SkeletonCrew _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
