On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 02:23:44PM -0800, MenTaLguY wrote:
I think this is one area where the longer release cycles have hurt us recently -- it's been too easy to become complacent about things like that without frequent releases to keep us honest.
Agreed. The long periods between releases are in part due to how long it takes to get through releases. I started the planning for the release back in November, and here we're on month 4 now. For me the best thing about the release will be finally getting my freetime back!
It's also quite stressful to have to say no to good new features, and to worry over a pile of bugs that doesn't shrink fat enough. Thankfully the new bug tracker makes life a lot easier; with SourceForge, by this stage in the release I'd be completely burnt out.
We really ought to be releasing every 6 months. Every 3 months would probably be even better. This would mean that we'd need to be able to go from Slush to Release in under 4 weeks.
To achieve that, we'd need to have faster response on bugs, scale feature work down (or make better use of branches), and use test suites and automation more heavily. As Ishmal pointed out, we also need more maintainers for caring for platform bugs. And since a large proportion of our release critical bugs were in relation to extensions, we need a stronger team and a better approach there.
I also think if several people were to focus exclusively on bug fixes instead of feature work for a release or two, and get our bug count down to something reasonable, it would make releases a breeze to get through.
Bryce