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

On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 08:18, Ian Piumarta wrote:
> 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.
> 
When I worked at OpenLink software, we managed around 20 ports (lots of
Unices, Mac, Win, VMS) and build weekly releases - so I have a bit of
experience in automating this :-). Is there somewhere I can help in
automating? Could we parallelize this by having four people doing the
job on one machine?

I do agree that the VM release number should state the same as the image
release number. Of course, if nothing changed, a simple patch might work
;-). 

> 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.
> 
YMMV, etcetera. You're probably not alone, but you're probably not a
majority either. However, since the upcoming releases most likely will
concentrate on picking stuff apart and making it harder to get a decent
Squeak distro, your, err, 'faction' will probably grow a bit ;-).

(making it harder, that is, until we master packaging etcetera - one of
the main reasons to go through short release cycles IMO, because it will
help us (force us) create a smooth process for building and releasing
various images - 'core', the 'fat' image we now have, and anything else
people want to pick up).

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