On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Joe Brockmeier <j...@zonker.net> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 05, 2012 at 06:34:35AM -0800, Kevin Kluge wrote: >> I'd have a preference for 6 month releases. Releases are a lot of >> work and I'd prefer to spread that over fewer iterations per year. > > Presumably, releases will be less work once we do them a few times and > keep adding automation. > > I'm not really picky about 6-month vs. 4-month, but I just wanted to > point out that future releases should be easier than this one.
Six months seems like an eternity to me, though Kevin's point re level of effort is worth acknowledging. Look at the past history of changes within 6 month windows - they've been massive - if anything this increases the QA burden at the end of a large development cycle, there is greater surface area in which changes happen. I personally favor release frequently and release often with smaller changesets. Honestly the focus of the 4.0 release was largely getting the codebase into shape from an ASF policy POV - but that doesn't diminish the massive number of man hours invested into manually testing. IMO that's not repeatable nor should we strive to make it routinely repeatable at that scale. We were fortunate that the Citrix QA folks essentially carved out man-weeks worth of time for us, but we can't guarantee that they will equally be available to us, nor should the project be dependent on them. We simply have to have automated testing that runs continuously and thoroughly. The code base is too large and even to people who have been hacking on it for years, it's depths are occasionally unfathomable. > >> And I would just call them all major releases (versioning aside). >> I'm thinking of something like Fedora. We can independently decide to >> do minor releases (presumably no features) in between the majors. > > > Not sure I understand the distinction you're making here. > > In another thread, I think we were discussing monthly releases for minor > releases. IMHO, that's a good schedule and we should try for a monthly > release rather than trying to decide each one independently. (e.g. > "well, do we have enough bugfixes for a point release now? How about > now?" Etc.) I think this is far more subjective. You don't issue a bugfix release if there are no bugs to fix (unlikely that there will be no bugs, but there might be no bugs that are worth fixing, or that people have fixed) or alternatively we may discover a bug awful enough to demand a faster release and only releasing on 'patch Tuesday' isn't in everyone's best interest. --David
