On Oct 13, 2009, at 10:43 PM, Craig Citro wrote: > >>> And, let's be honest, no >>> release cycle is really going to be much shorter than that. >> >> Are you sure? I personally did 100% of the releases for 3 years >> with >> an average of 1-week for the release cycle. >> > > Who knows -- maybe I'm wrong? Do you want to test it? Try doing > sage-4.2 in a week. Or even two. I don't know -- maybe this will be > easy? Maybe it will be impossible? Maybe you can do it, but you won't > get anything else done in those two weeks? (My money's on that last > one, with it coming in right at two weeks at best.) > > Is there a table somewhere of Sage versions and release dates? > > I don't know that I said this explicitly in my last email -- I like > our system of shorter release cycles in general. That said, I don't > think we need to say "we must have a release every three weeks!" We > should say "three months is too long!" All in all, I don't think > there's a need to rush -- it should be up to the release manager to > say "okay, we've merged a bunch of stuff, and the other big stuff on > the horizon is still at least a week or two off -- let's > feature-freeze and start cleaning up the current build/doctest > failures." > > In short, I guess I'm saying that I don't think there's anything > *wrong* with the system as it currently stands. I think the only > weakness is that there aren't enough people who have the time and > energy volunteering to be release manager right now. As I mentioned > above, I think part of the problem is the time commitment > (*especially* for your first release), but maybe not.
Actually, I think the "start cleaning up the current build/doctest failures" phase is what's wrong with the system. Broken stuff shouldn't go in in the first place (or should find its way back out with a "needs work" unless it's really critical). Of course the problem is that we don't find the failures until well after the stuff is merged, so just hunting down why something broke is time-intensive. (I don't have a full answer to this, but more automated testing on a wider range of platforms could go a long way here...) If this phase weren't such a big deal, then the commitment would be reduced, and one could actually do quick releases (i.e. one wouldn't get to the end of the week or two, but have a completely unreleasable bundle and no more time to put into it.) Not that there aren't always other blockers, but that's somewhat orthogonal. - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
