Hi William,
William Skaggs wrote:
If you plan for three months, it will take nine months, so you should plan for
three months. If you plan for six months it will take over a year.
Feynman's Law: Everything takes twice as long as you expect it will, even when you take into account Feynman's Law.
The problem is that if you go way over schedule (that is, if we say 3 months, and we're still not at 2.2 in 6 to 8 months time), you end up moving to a feature-based thing. People start working on things which hadn't been planned and you end up with so much schedule creep that the old schedule is eventually ignored and forgotten (I think in 1.3 this happened sometime at the start of 2002, although I wouldn't be able to put my finger on a particular event). At which point you need to come up with a new plan.
I could be convinced that having a release in 3 months is the right thing (I am under no illusions though - if I disagree with it, that won't necessarily influence the eventual decision). It would depend on the feature lists we compile over the next few days/weeks.
But I would be worried that if we set off on too short a cycle that people will not start features which won't be done in 6 weeks. And we might only end up with 2 or 3 people working on 2.1.x, which would be a shame given that we are getting more & more people contributing code at the moment. I'm agreed that if we have features without someone to write them that they shouldn't hold up a 2.2 release, though.
Cheers, Dave.
-- Dave Neary bolsh@xxxxxxxx
