On 05/17/2012 05:57 PM, John Kinsella wrote:
On May 17, 2012, at 2:29 PM, David Nalley wrote:
[lots of snippage below]
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 9:59 AM, Robert Schweikert<rjsch...@suse.com> wrote:
My suggestion would be to go with a 6 month time based release cycle and
also decide on a version numbering scheme.
X.Y.Z
- X : increases when there is a "major" change in architecture or some major
new feature
- Y : increases with every release every 6 month (reset when X increases)
- Z : increases when there are "must fix bugs" or annoying bugs that get
fixed in a release branch (reset when Y increases)
Wholeheartedly agree with the above versioning logic.
So we're in agreement to provide maintenance on x.y releases for a period of
time? Say the last two minor (Y) releases?
What do we think is a reasonable time to get a release out? 3 months?
4 months? 6 months? Lets find where we need to place the stake and do
so soon.
6 months between releases sounds too slow to me as a user- I'd prefer to see 3
or 4 months between releases.
Maybe if you are a user of the upstream release directly. However, I
suspect that most users will be using/depending on packages provided by
their distro of choice. Fedora and Ubuntu run on 6 month cycles,
openSUSE runs on an 8 month cycle.
From a packagers point of view, maintaining a package where the
upstream code changes in X or Y every 3 to 4 month is tiresome. A
packager may not be an upstream developer and only more or less loosely
connected to the upstream community.
Of course much of this depends on the quality of the code released by
the upstream project and the incompatibilities introduced. If a package
maintainer has to carry a set of patches around for every release and
that set changes with every release then you are looking at a lot of
work that a volunteer maintainer is not going to want to go through
every 3 or 4 month. If packagers can get away with carrying only few, if
any patches and the tarball is pretty much a drop in replacement for the
previous release then a shorter cycle is not that big of a deal.
As a developer, I'd think it's easier to keep track of things on a shorter
release cycle and things wouldn't slip as much...
This I think all depends on what people are used to.
Robert
--
Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU
SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX
Tech Lead
rjsch...@suse.com
rschw...@ca.ibm.com
781-464-8147
