On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 10:25:01AM -0400, Mark Phippard wrote: > Yes. Go back to having new releases when there is enough interesting > content to justify the release. We can lower the bar from the old days. > There does not need to always be a big ticket feature or two driving the > release, but if there is nothing worthy of a release we should not do one > just because the calendar says so.
I also had concerns in the beginning when Julian brought up the proposal of time-based releases. I didn't expect it to work. But I think what Julian has shown us is that the calendar keeps us honest in our commitment to actually do releases. If Julian hadn't been driving this, I believe we would be in a situation where fixes would accumulate on trunk and not be released at all, because a general lack of activity makes doing releases look like a lot of work unless we're used to doing them regularly and the process is streamlined accordingly. I have experience with time-based releases in another community (OpenBSD). Releases happen every 6 months, like clock work. There's not much worry about fixes and features missing the boat, because the next boat will be prepared and ready soon enough. Avoiding the introduction of regressions in new releases is a much bigger concern there, everything else can wait when in doubt. I think this would also work well for Subversion, but we have to adopt a mind set that makes this work. In my opinion the world will not end for Subversion when Python 2 falls out of support, even if no current release of SVN fully supports Python 3. This is because our userbase has been slowing down with us. For the most part, Subversion is not run on the latest version of Linux of the day. It is run on server operating systems like Red Hat and Windows 20xx Server which will still have Python 2 around. Our new LTS release scheme is a good fit for this. Most SVN clients are TortoiseSVN on corporate desktops. The Linux client install base has moved on to Git/Hg. People being hired as software developers on Linux today have usually never worked with SVN and won't be expected to. I have not followed these Python 3 patches closely but it sounds like we are very close to having full support for Python 3 on trunk already or will have it soon. Which means it will be ready in time for 1.14 LTS as originally scheduled. Is that really not enough?
