Den 21-04-2010 00:29, Kristian Nielsen skrev:
2. On a note related to stability, I think we need to carefully avoid the mistakes from the MySQL release model. Basically, we need to have regular releases (6-12 month cycles). This is all-important! Much more important than any single feature, however big. We must_never_ push a feature into a tree if it is not ready. Better make an empty release! [...] We should have made_all_ features rolling.
I completely agree. I've always been a huge fan of the way other projects do this. They set a date for when a release will go out, and if a feature isn't ready by the start of the freeze period, it doesn't make it to the release. In theory this means there could be empty or irrelevant releases. But in practice, it actually does work. But people coming from closed source projects absolutely hate this kind of administration. To me, both ways are reasonable. You can either make a list of features that will go into a release and do the release when the features are done. Or you can set a date and release with the features that are ready at the time. I personally prefer the latter. And this is the one that best fit the release schedules of the Linux distros. The problem is that software managers try to do both, and that can't work. Of course, it's possible to balance the two approaches and mark some features as so important they can move the release dates, but I think this mostly just creates more confusion. Bo.