On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 11:30 AM, Hugo Trippaers <h...@apache.org> wrote: > Hey all, > > I’m getting somewhat concerned about the 4.4 release. We don’t seems to be > able to get the 4.4 branch in shape for a release candidate and meanwhile > master is diverging further and further. We also know that once we hit the RC > phase we will probably need a sizable number of iterations to eventually ship > the release. Based on past experience, if we keep up like this we will have > another release that will actually be released way after the feature freeze > for the next release (July 18). Probably leaving us in the same bad spot for > the next release. > > I tried to come up with a number of solutions that could rectify the > situation and help the release move forward, but i can’t think of any. Save > for some options that might be considered extreme ideas. One the the more > prominent ideas in my mind at the moment is skipping the 4.4 release all > together and combine it with the next planned release (whether its 5.0 or > 4.5). This would require a community effort to focus on quality in the next > month and basically freeze the master for features and have a community wide > push for quality to get the next release out on schedule. > > But before i go on and shout out even more drastic ideas, what do you think > about the current 4.4 release. How close do you feel that we are to having a > releasable product? >
So this sounds very familiar to a discussion we had in 4.1 or 4.2 timeframes. (I may have even been one of the folks proposing similar ideas, I don't recall) To save you some reading I am -1 on the idea of canceling 4.4. (though really - anyone can propose a release and ask for votes, we have adopted a bit more rigor, but that structure isn't demanded.) Here's the issues I see: 1. We set the expectation that 4.4 is coming; people worked hard to get features in, and our users are waiting on it. 2. We may not be perfect from a schedule perspective, but giving up on a release is a pretty negative thing to do - whats the reaction going to be? 3. Do you think we are in a position to make 4.5 any better? Speaking very frankly, I worry that we are not. I don't think that we have either the tooling or the social desire at present to make significant strides here. We don't dictate the priorities for individual developers. It might be a different story if we were in a corporate shop and could control what folks work on, it might be a different story. --David
