On Sun, 2008-09-28 at 23:51 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > "Horst H. von Brand" <vonbrand@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > Ralf Corsepius <rc040203@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> Decouple "product development" (here: FC<N+1>) development from bleeding > >> edge "unstable/experimental" "head development" (here: rawhide). > > > Needs more hands. Starves the "product development" of developers and > > testers. Was the idea in Linux before 2.6, was abandoned for exactly the > > above reasons. > > Yeah ... when it's time to ship a release, you need a forcing function > to encourage people to test-and-fix-bugs, rather than develop-cool-new- > features. Correct. > Branching early encourages people to ignore the release and > do the latter. Well, I don't agree. IMO, branching encourages "early adopter end-users to try sneak previews" and to stay away from the "bleeding edge aiming at developers". > The Postgres project has generally avoided early branching, and I think > that policy has been a significant contributor to our ten-year history > of making stable releases. > > Branching early works if you have a sufficiently large critical mass of > developers and testers who like to work on stabilizing a release, and > another sufficiently large critical mass of people who prefer to work > on pushing new features forward, plus enough extra manpower to deal with > keeping the two branches in sync. If you lack any of those things it's > a loser. > > There are certainly a small number of open source projects that have > enough popularity and enough ensuing manpower-and-expertise to make a go > of this approach. Small number of projects? Probably a matter of perspective ;) > To imagine that it's workable for the majority of > projects is to demonstrate lack of connection to reality. Pardon, but you probably can relate, why I have to disagree on this. I would turn this argument around: The apparent lack of quality of the distro, the amount of bureaucracy and ineffectiveness the Fedora approach cause are a living proof for a non-functional approach. Ralf -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
