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(I mistakenly sent this to Bryce privately before; sharing to all recipients now)
I understand the dilemma with switching build system, especially when it's such a feature-rich thing as the old one, and the whole Inkscape project depends on it's reliability. That's the immediate problem for 0.92.
But on the other, more general challenge to release speed you are lifting - "What causes the delays are unfinished work and bugs, and needing to verify that we are indeed stable enough to release." I think the "Ubuntu way" may help: just set a fixed dates for released, so everyone has dates to relate to. (As you know Ubuntu has the idea of feature release in autumn, bugfix release in spring; I don't know how that translates to Inkscape release culture)
It would require a "dev branch" that's highly unstable, aswell as a more stable "ready for release" branch which includes those features/bugs that's been verified good enough to be included in next release.
Sketch of what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/Mt7gDng.png
Mvh
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On 7 February 2016 at 02:54, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 04, 2016 at 08:42:38AM -0500, Martin Owens wrote:
On Thu, 2016-02-04 at 10:23 +0100, Sebastian Zartner wrote:
While I am currently not involved in the Inkscape development at all, I have some experience with release processes and may help to define a proper development and release cycle.
Dear Sebastian,
There is a process for releases and the main component is a release sponsor or main coordinator. I believe the lack of sponsor is the main reason for not getting a 0.92 version released any sooner. Although I would love to see one on the sooner side.
No, the duty here is on me. It's not a problem of lack of a belly button for the task, but more of a time overcommitment issue.
For 0.92, the specific thing blocking the release from proceeding is needing to get the cmake build system fully squared away. To that end, I recently posted a list of remaining tasks where I need help:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CMake_Tasks
Some of those may already be done, but need to be doublechecked. Once all the 0.92 priorities are crossed off, then I think we can go ahead and proceed with the release.
Besides cmake, the one other thing that must be done is a review of the current release stability. But so long as we don't have any development work in intermediate stages, and no absolutely killer bugs, I think we could cut a release and plan on a point release. We did a pretty through scrub last time we were all focusing on getting 0.92 done, and assuming things haven't majorly deteriorated since then, I think this would be fine.
Bryce, do you have links we can share with Sebastian showing the organisational side for 0.91? Maybe they can help make the process better for the next release?
Yeah I've been keeping the release coordination links on wiki pretty up to date with the specifics of the process. However, with the build system and now potentially the vcs system likely to change soon, a lot is in flux.
The #1 best thing that can be done right now to improve the release process is to strengthen the build system. A lot of manual tasks in the release will go away or be more easily automated once we can get unified onto cmake (indeed this is my primary motivation for hammering on the cmake transition).
Automating the procedure of actually uploading the distribution package to the website and making the associated web collateral get updated would be a big improvement too, but honestly that work is pretty small scope in the grand scheme of things. But boiling the release process down to a single script or small number of scripts that can be run, is a long term goal. With our current release cadence the benefit will be minimal, but if we move to a faster cadence it could help a lot. I seem to recall once we decide to cut a release, it is on the order of a couple evenings to get it out.
Frankly the actual mechanics of doing a release, while more cumbersome than they should be, aren't where we usually get hung up and delayed. What causes the delays are unfinished work and bugs, and needing to verify that we are indeed stable enough to release. And that's an area I would definitely love to see some discussion around how we could improve.
There is also some time consumed each release on translation work, documenting, advocacy/promotion, and so forth, but a lot of that has already been nicely distributed amongst the team and there are efforts ongoing to improve them. With our releases being so infrequent, the promotion efforts seem to always have to start from scratch, and I suspect we could do a lot better there, but likely if we improve the release cadence technically, this bit will become more tractable.
Anyway, I would love if we could move to a model where we're doing a full release once every few months, and Sebastian I'd love to take you up on your offer of assistance to achieve this!
Bryce
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