Hi,
First, I'd like to say that I think it's a pity that you replied
so aggressively to the mail - I would have liked to hear more
comments, but I think that the tone of the thread may have
intimidated people somewhat.
Sven Neumann wrote:
> We all know that but your roadmap gave a different impression. Instead
> of pointing out what we want to achieve you gave a list of dates. Since
> we will not match a single one of these dates, it doesn't make sense to
> publish such a list.
I am convinced that if we make releases conditional on a feature
set that we will not have a 2.2 in 2004. If we're not making our
major releases based on a feature set, then the only alternative
is to make releases time-based. This has worked for other
projects, I think it can work for ours.
> Doing the release tarball takes about half an hour. What takes time is
> to test it, to upload the tarball, put it on the FTP site, add a
> bugzilla version, change www.gimp.org to point to the new release,
> announce the release on freshmeat, gnomedesktop.org, linuxartist.org
> ... You can hardly cut down much of this.
You can certainly spread it around. I update the NEWS now, as
well as you. Anyone can do that. Same thing goes for making the
announcement on freshmeat, gnome-desktop, linuxartist... I can do
bugzilla tags.
Anything which requires specialist knowledge (make distcheck, as
you have pointed out, requires a finely balanced set of versions
for a bunch of stuff, and there are very few people who
understand the website system) or permissions (uploading the
tarball) is another matter, but it doesn't make sense in general to
have only one person able to do these things. The thing which
takes the longest for *me* is make distcheck.
> But I don't see what you are trying to argument about here. We agreed
> that we will do regular releases, we are already doing releases every
> two or three weeks. The point is just that I don't want to have a list
> that tells me that a release is pending next sunday.
I got the point; so I'll repeat mine, and then we can stop. We're
more or less agreed that to have 2.2 by the end of June, we need
to
1) have 2.0 this month
2) Branch a stable development branch next month
3) Feature freeze at the start of April
4) start pre-releases in the middle of April
5) Release 2.2 the end of June.
I don't think there's any argument there. All I did was throw in
a release every couple of weeks between those 5 points. I think
it's helpful to show how little time there will be in this
development cycle.
> Some real content in the roadmap instead of meaning-less dates would
> be helpful. At perhaps make it a proposal for a roadmap next time.
This comment got me angry. I've calmed down now. Everything I
post to this list that isn't meant to be a fact is an opinion,
and a request for comments. If I say "March 17th is St. Patrick's
Day", that's a fact. If I say "I think we should have 2.2.0 at
the end of June, and I think this is more or less how to get
there", that's opinion. See the difference? I asked for comments.
I even got a couple of positive ones, in e-mails off-list. How
much more proposally would you like it to be?
Cheers,
Dave.
--
David Neary,
Lyon, France
E-Mail: bolsh@xxxxxxxx
