[bt-devel] Reviewing the Release Cycle

[Gary Holmlund]

On 05/20/2010 01:25 PM, Raoul Snyman wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> With the recent release of BibleTime 2.7, and looking at how short the
> changelog is, I felt that we should review the length of the release cycle.
>
> I know that the reason it was shortened to 6 weeks was so that we would get
> new versions going out regularly, and without months and months of inaction,
> but I think that 6 weeks is too short a time to actually get a lot of work
> done.
>
> When there is a new release with a significant version number (like 2.7), I
> would expect some fairly major new features, but recently we've mostly been
> bug fixing, which should be relegated to a bugfix release number (like 2.6.1),
> since it doesn't have any significant new functionality in it.
>
> Certainly from my perspective, and I know from some other folks' perspectives
> as well (Jaak, for instance), I don't have a lot of time on my hands, and
> while I'd like to contribute to BT, the 6 week cycle means I don't get enough
> of a chance to do anything. I sadly haven't even been able to attend the last
> two *-a-thons.
>
> I propose we lengthen the cycle to 3 months, and implement bugfix releases.
> This way our release cycles are long enough to include new features, and we
> can still fix up some bugs and release bugfixes.
>
> Quite honestly, I think that going up 4 releases in a standard Ubuntu release
> cycle is a little ridiculous. It's almost like we're pushing up our version
> number just to look like a really mature project.
>
> I'd really like to get stuck into the UI and try to make things better in
> terms of usability and "pretty", but the current release cycle doesn't work
> for me :-(
>    
We have had a 8 week release cycle with 6 weeks of development time. I 
agree it is to short to work on larger features. A 13 week release cycle 
with 11 weeks of development would be better.

The shorter cycle has been good for getting recent versions into Ubuntu 
and Fedora. We need to think about how a 13 week cycle will affect this. 
Jonathan says that August 12th is the latest date for getting into 
Ubuntu 10.10. I suggest our next release date be August 1st and then 
quarterly after that. This should keep us on cycle with Ubuntu since 
they have 6 month release cycles. Fedora is also on a 6 month cycle 
about 1 month behind Ubuntu.  This would mean that would be a 10 week 
release cycle for the next release.

Gary