Chris Withers wrote:
Lennart Regebro wrote:
So this is not a problem with deprecation period, time based releases
or anything else, then.
No, but the slew of deprecation warnings, proliferation of branches that
need to be supported (regardless of whether they're "officially"
production or not) and sheer amount of change you now HAVE (rather than
'can choose') to deal with seems a sign, at least to me, that time-based
releases were a nice experiment, but maybe it's time to think again?
I disagree completely. I think time based releases were a factor in
rescuing at least Zope 2 from complete stagnation. I also think that
time based releases have helped getting a lot more Zope 3 to everybody
much faster than before. They have encouraged people to actually
contribute to the core, as they know the fix or feature will be in there
in a few months, at a predictable time, not years in the indefinitey
future as it was before. Overall I think time based releases have been
overwhelmingly *successful*.
And yes, porting applications to new releases takes time and is
frequently painful. If the alternative is stagnation or having to write
code against old APIs that I know have better alternatives somewhere in
subversion but don't know when they'll ever get released, I'll gladly
take that pain.
That said, of course things have to be done carefully. Stick with the
release policy we all should be following anyway: don't deprecate
anything in a bugfix release. Carefully consider backwards
compatibility. Back out of changes that are too damaging.
I'm curious to hear what alternative you'd prefer. I didn't like the old
release "policy" much: from 2.6 to 2.7 took over a year and a half. The
alpha for 2.7 was released almost a *year* before 2.7 was finally
released. It then took a year for 2.8 to be released. Nobody knew what
was going to happen when, and Zope 2 development was pretty stagnant for
huge spans of time (not discounting the wonderful work that *was* done
in that period). People were building piles of framework code on top of
Zope that should've gone into the core where we could all share it, but
people avoided the core.
Now, Zope 2 is alive again.
Regards,
Martijn
_______________________________________________
Zope-Dev maillist - Zope-Dev@zope.org
http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
** No cross posts or HTML encoding! **
(Related lists -
http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )
