[bt-devel] Release Cycle Refinement

[Gary Holmlund]

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Nov 2009, Raoul Snyman wrote:
>
>   
>> After further discussion between Martin, Jaak and myself, we came to an
>> agreement that the 2.4 and 2.5 releases would continue as scheduled, but that
>> we'd try a 6 week cycle for 2.6.
>>     
>
> You mean 8?
>
>   
>> What does everyone think about this? Any comments or suggestions?
>>     
>
> I would have been willing to take 2-4 months between major (2.x)
> releases. Maybe 4 months is too much, but 8 weeks is still quite short.
>
> There should be at least one month between minor (2.x.x) releases so
> that packagers and users have enough time to adopt them. Only if we find
> and fix grave bugs we should release a minor with a shorter interval.
>
> I also repeat my opinion about the meaning of RC: it's meant to be
> tested by everyone, so it should have long life enough to get it to end
> users via packagers. It means about 4 weeks. I know it's very long
> compared to our current pace, but I don't see a way out of the problem.
> If it's not going to be publicly available in practice, we can leave it
> out altogether and just announce a couple of betas and try to find
> the bugs ourselves (which we have been doing right now). Especially if
> we allow bugfixes after the last RC. As I said, the last RC should be
> released (almost) as is with a new version number. If there are many
> changes, a new RC should be released with RCn+1 version number.
>
> But I can be happy with the new consensus. Only the usage of "RC" name
> against the common convention would remain as a complaint.
>
>   Yours,
> 	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
> 	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)
>   
I have been feeling that a 6 week cycle is to short. I was happy that we 
choose a 5 week cycle for BT 2.5 because it works well for a final 
Windows version and a Christmas release, but that should not be 
continued.  I think that we should not make to big a change and think 
that trying a 8 week cycle and re-evaluating when we have done 1 or 2 
cycles seems best to me.

Gary