Hi, there's another possibility to speed up the Sage release frequency, by a certain parallelization. Currently, the Sage releases are done sequentially, and in two phases:
- the "alpha" phase, where tons of tickets are merged, and new functionality gets in - the "release cadidate" phase, where feature freeze holds, and only (a few) blocker tickets are adressed Usually, both phases take some essentially "uncompressible" time --- the first one, because of the sheer number of tickets to be merged, and the second one, because a good part of the blocker tickets are hard to solve (and/or need thorough testing, often more than one development cycle, and so on). How about intertwining these two phases? In other words, as soon as (say) Sage 4.1.3 leaves the "alpha" phase and Sage-4.1.3.rc0 is created, essentially it is branched into the Sage-4.1.3.rc* series on the one hand, and more or less renamed into Sage-4.1.4.alpha0 (say). All tickets with new features could then immediately applied into this newly opened up Sage-4.1.4.alpha* series, whereas at the same time Sage-4.1.3.rc* series gets stabilized, and finally results in Sage-4.1.3. As soon as all blockers for Sage-4.1.3 are adressed and it finally gets released, the Sage-4.1.4 development cycle can switch from the "alpha" to "rc" phase. And Sage-4.2 (say) could start its "alpha" phase. And so on. The drawback of this approach is, that every change done in the Sage-4.1.3.rc* series has to be applied *twice*, because it has to be applied also to the Sage-4.1.4.alpha series. However, from experience, these changes are usually very small, both in size, and in number. And they are well-understood, so this shouldn't hurt much. This way, "release managers" for two different (consecutive) releases would work in parallel all the time, and would of course be able to help each other. Maybe, due to synergies, we would have more than only a "double" benefit. OTOH, this would open up the possibility of having special "alpha release managers" and different "rc release managers" finishing off the actual release --- I do think that different qualities are needed, resp. benefical, for being either an "alpha", or a "rc" release manager. Cheers, Georg --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
