On 2010-May-26 01:13:59 -0700, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 12:59 AM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: >> Looking at the Sage roadmap >> >> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/roadmap >> >> I see Sage 4.4.3 is "A tiny minor release on the way to 5.0" which is >> due on 30th May. >> >> Sage 5.0 is due out two days later on first of June. >> >> I don't believe such a release strategy says anything positive for >> Sage. In fact, quite the opposite - I think it looks incredibly >> amateurish. Who can take a program serious if two releases are made >> two days apart?
I agree with these sentiments. Compare that roadmap with the release engineering schedules two other FOSS projects that are a similar order of magnitude in size to Sage: FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/releng/ http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/schedule.html OpenOffice.org: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/ReleaseSchedule http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OOoRelease32 (those projects were picked because I could easily find release schedules for them) >Sage releases rarely come out on the random day that they happened to >be scheduled for on trac. That day is just some field one fills in >when making the milestone. I wouldn't take it too seriously. Whilst it's common for software project milestones to slip, there is no indication on the Sage roadmap page that those dates are just random numbers someone picked. Having a realistic date helps both users (who can plan around when the specified features will be available) and developers (who have something to aim at). -- Peter Jeremy
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