[sword-devel] On the need for regular releases of Sword libs

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Karl,

You are right.  The Bibletime team has asked me to commit to a quarterly 
release cycle.  They have said that it would inspire more development if 
developers knew their code would be released in a timely manner.  I 
would like to release more often.

I hate releasing when I know there are outstanding issue.  Maybe because 
the releases have been so far apart and I feel if I don't get things in, 
they won't be in for a long time.

It all seems a catch 22.  Developers don't contribute because they don't 
see their work released.  I won't release because developers won't 
contribute and fix the outstanding bugs... yada yada. (Did you know 
'YADA' mean 'I Know' in Hebrew?)

So, I would like to commit to regular releases for your team, the 
Bibletime team, and others using the engine.  I don't think I could 
commit to quarterly releases right now.  I agree we definitely need to 
release more than once a year.  Is there a middle ground we can 
negotiate between quarterly and biannually?

Looking at fedoraproject.org, it looks like they have nearly annual 
release cycles.  If we commit at least to twice a year, we will assure a 
new release for each fedora release.

We also could be more disciplined doing point releases of bug fixes.  I 
have failed completely in this area.  Every release has been when we 
feel we have enough new features to warrant a release.

I have also not been forced to be motivated because I use SVN for most 
all of my work and release BibleCS compiled statically against SVN.

So, in response, I say "Yes, thank you for the kick in the butt (and the 
previous kick in the butt by Martin from Bibletime-- to which I had 
mentally queue this message).

Let's negotiate a set release schedule target to shoot for.

Let's be more mindful of point releases between these target release dates.

And of course I would appreciate leads to encourage our teams to check 
the bug list and try to be proactive fixing engine bugs.

My apologies for the negligence.

	-Troy.

PS.  Jira (our bug tracker) seems to be down.  We just did major server 
upgrades of Java and Tomcat.  I'll see if I can get things back online 
shortly.



Karl Kleinpaste wrote:
> I write here today as a sort of /agent provocateur/, hoping to get a bit
> of a rise out of...well, somebody, possibly several somebodies.  The
> formal idea of an /agent provocateur/ is someone actually in opposition
> to the organization's goals; that is not me, that is, I am of course
> supportive of Sword.  But I am explicitly hoping to provoke conversation
> and debate, and possibly argument, but ultimately action.
>                     ________________________________
> 
> In roughly 6 weeks, an entire year will have passed since the release of
> 1.5.9.  Since that time, 3 or 4 releases of BibleTime have come out, 7
> releases of GnomeSword (none since March), 2 releases of MacSword, and
> (based on Crosswire front page info) at least a couple of BibleDesktop.
> 
> We of GnomeSword have been in a holding pattern before making our next
> release for a while now, hoping for 1.5.10 to come out, which will
> provide certain needed bits of substructure that are available today
> only to those who build Sword for themselves out of SVN.  I know that
> the BibleTime folks are in a similar position.
> 
> As a wide-view matter of project policy, just-once-per-year release of
> the underlying substrate upon which the UIs depend is simply nowhere
> near often enough.  Shortly after the release of 1.5.9, the problem of
> bugs in "&entity;" handling arose; a number of other bugs have been
> fixed, e.g. related to matters such as morph output, and a number of
> formatting glitches; several small but important (to us) features have
> been added, such as <figure>/<img> linkages for our UIs which handle
> graphical content.  And we, and more importantly our users, are being
> held back, in a practical sense, because no one can get at these
> features and bugfixes if they depend on the mere yearly releases of
> Sword.  Rather few folks are motivated to build backend libraries on
> their own, but everybody would be happy to upgrade automatically using
> their systems' package managers, if only there was something to upgrade.
> 
> I know that this is technically volunteer work for all of us.  I know
> that we do it when we have both motivation and time.  I know that Troy
> in particular has had a hard school schedule and that the demands on him
> for that are high.  But on the other hand, I know that people actually
> do the things in which they invest themselves.
> 
> Shortly after the initial call for 1.5.10 -- already 10 weeks in the
> past -- on request I filed a half dozen bug reports for things I knew
> needed attention.  Troy and I spent a little time on 2 of them; as far
> as I know, the other 4 have received no attention at all, and none have
> achieved resolution.
> 
> At this point, what I believe is needed in the short term is a new
> release "right away" (interpret those words in some appropriately fuzzy
> fashion) in order to get as much benefit as is immediately available
> from today's SVN.  Call it 1.5.10, or call it 1.5.9a if you like, but
> *call it*, and soon.
> 
> For the long term, I believe a more stringent, regular schedule for
> advancement and release is very badly needed.  Today's offhand,
> imprecise, uncertain, when-we-feel-like-it, when-we-get-around-to-it
> attitude is definitely hurting the projects, and makes all the projects
> unhealthy to one degree or another.  Indeed, and frankly, it is
> unprofessional.  It makes the rest of us delay our work.  It makes our
> work appear to be of lower quality than it ought by rights to appear,
> because the improvements to the substrate that will make our work look
> good continue to be unavailable.
> 
> --karl
> 
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