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Time-based release actually works wellTime-based release actually works wellPosted Feb 27, 2008 19:14 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216)In reply to: The Xorg 7.4 release plan by pr1268 Parent article: The Xorg 7.4 release plan It's not necessarily a bad idea. Indeed, changing your schedule so that it meets your customers' is a good idea, and most people use X.org from a distro - not directly. But more importantly, Martin Michlmayr (Debian developer and formerly Debian Project Leader) is completing his doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge with a thesis entitled “Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free, and Open Source Projects: Exploring the Impact of Release Management. He argues that time-based releases (e.g., where releases reliably happen every 6 months) is actually a reasonable approach. In FLOSS, you can typically decide what to include - or not include - on a particular date, depending on what's ready. By having a date, people can try to get the various bits ready... and if a snag happens, omit that part. GNOME already uses this approach. So if X.org can switch to this in general (not just have a one-off deadline), it'd be good for all.
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Time-based release actually works well Posted Feb 27, 2008 20:28 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Yes. The FLOSS world is full of interdependencies. Gnome depends on improvements in X for newer features. Fedora/Ubuntu depend on improvements to Gnome and to X for their new releases. Application developers depend on Gnome and X and other libs to be improved for their improvements. Everybody depends on Users who actually need binary releases from distributions. That is, to say, that if X does not pay attention to the needs of Distros they also ignore the needs of end users and application developers. If there are no releases done with distros are released, then there is really no point to even having a release. Nobody can use it, nobody will use it. If you do feature-releases then your timeline is going to fluctuate. Users/Application developers/distros can not depend on you to ship a product so they can't take advantage of improvements you offer. Delays build up, users get irritated, developers get bored, important improvements and bug fixes remain unavailable to most users, and development stagnates. Coordination is key. A convoy at sea is only as fast as it's slowest ship. Fedora is important in this regard because they are the early adopters. They get things first and flush out problems for other distributions. Ubuntu also follows the same pattern of Fedora with 6-8 month release times so they are helped also by these timed releases. More users mean more testing, bugs get found quicker and ultimately they get fixed quicker. etc etc.
Time-based release actually works well Posted Feb 28, 2008 11:49 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] KDE is using a time based release schedule as well now: http://tuxenclave.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/kde-41-roadmap...
Time-based release actually works well Posted Feb 28, 2008 20:59 UTC (Thu) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link] KDE point releases within a major release series (e.g. 3.x) have actually always been date-driven. 4.0 didn't have a date for much of the release cycle because it was a generational jump and greater flexibility was required in the face of the task.
Time-based release actually works well Posted Mar 1, 2008 23:05 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] """ It's not necessarily a bad idea. Indeed, changing your schedule so that it meets your customers' is a good idea, and most people use X.org from a distro - not directly. """ I find the increasing popularity of time-based releases to be refreshing and encouraging... after years of hearing the phrase "it's ready when it's ready" used to cover for a lack of a proper release plan by some projects. Deadlines mean that people have to buckle down and do the unfun stuff rather than perpetually working on cool new stuff that's never quite ready for release.
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