Re: Cayenne release policy thoughts

1. More releases means more patching and releasing of bug fixes to 
different branches.

To understand the impact of this we need to consider what a new release 
means and how many old releases we need to support.

* API change

* new features added

* deprecated methods removed

We've typically never added a feature to a x.y release once it is final. 
But that doesn't have to be a hard and fast rule. For example, we could 
decide to release 4.0.1 with new features as long as no existing 
functionality is broken. Or conversely we could call it 4.1, but no 
longer provide bug fixes for 4.0, requiring users to upgrade to get 
those fixes as long as that upgrade doesn't require the user to change 
any code in their app.

So what is the balance between providing old bug fix releases and being 
able to move forward more quickly? saltstack is an example of a software 
project that adds new features from 2018.3.0 to 2018.3.1, but doesn't 
change existing functionality.


2. Faster release cycle signifies project health

Developers will look at the number of releases per year as a measurement 
of project health. So more releases are a good thing.


3. Separately versioned modeler

If the modeler was able to save older versions of the schema, then there 
would be no need to maintain older branches for that app and it could 
move forward more quickly without maintenance of old branches.


4. More lightweight alpha releases

To make it quick and easy to cut development milestones, can we skip the 
PMC voting process and go for something slightly less formal. Betas and 
release candidates would have the full review process. Or even just have 
an expedited 24 hour voting period.


Just a few thoughts. For our own projects we've been using milestone 
Cayenne releases in production for as long as I can remember, so I 
certainly like the idea of formalising them into shorter release cycles, 
particularly now that most of the disruptive (to users) changes in the 
API over the last years are probably behind us.


Ari



On 28/4/18 8:50pm, Nikita Timofeev wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Wanted to share my thoughts about our release policy.
>
> I think it will be better for Cayenne to reduce scopes of future
> releases, as not many users are ready to use milestone or even beta
> releases. At the same time we can't create final release if there are
> a lot of new things, because of long feedback cycle.
> Good example of this problem is 4.0 version that started 5 years ago
> (as a 3.2 back then) and still not finished. Even Java itself released
> faster now :)
>
> As for nearest plans, 4.1 already have some nice features (like
> field-based data objects or recently added completely new dbimport
> interface in Modeler), so I think we can target it to feature freeze
> after M2.
>
> And we can already start to push new tasks into next (4.2?) version or
> even think about several versions ahead.
>
> So any thoughts about overall shorter release cycles or 4.1, 4.2 release plans?
>