Re: 3.5 release timing (was Re: Outstanding 3.4 bugs?)

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Doug Way wrote:

> Hmm.  Having gone through the process (well, at least most of it), I 
> suppose a one-month release might be barely workable if the goal was 
> limited to fixes only as you say.  One problem has been coordinating 
> things via email (such as new VM releases, getting problems fixed), but 
> I suppose these things get better when people know what to expect after 
> the first time through.

On a personal note I'll just mention that making a VM release takes me an
entire day (while I recompile on four different machines and construct
more than a dozen seperate archives, _very_ slowly and methodically to
make sure I don't mess anything up too badly).  I wouldn't want to do this
every single month.  (Consider the 3.4gamma1 release as an
exception.)  Every quarter might be acceptable.

I realise that the VMs change much more slowly than the image itself and
new VM releases are only really be needed when something in the VM related
code (or the plugins) changes.  OTOH, it would be slightly confusing if
the latest VMs had lower version numbers than the latest stable images
(pretty much consistently, modulo the occasionaly four-week period when
the versions coincide after a VM-related change).

I think the whole regular release cycle is a bad idea anyway.  Even with
the current infrequent big releases I tend to lag behind the stable image
by a version or two, since there's just not enough incentive to change
until something is _obviously_ better (or new and exciting) in the latest
image.  My most recent image change was from 2.3 to 2.8.  If releases were
more frequent then deltas would be smaller and I'd be even less likely to
notice new stuff or improvements and hence track the latest image.  I'm
probably not alone in thinking/working this way.

Just my 2 centimes of a Euro worth.

Ian