On 04/05/12 13:57, Kevin Krammer wrote:
On Thursday, 2012-04-05, Duncan wrote:
dE . posted on Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:23:16 +0530 as excerpted:
So 'feature release' may mean (apart form including absolutely new
features) -
1) Restructuring the code (better management).
2) New backend or changed backend which may increase or decrease bugs.
And bug fixes mean fixing small time bugs in library or directly in the
app.
I'll let Kevin respond to that (tho it seems a reasonable summary to this
non-dev, here),
I agree. My guess is that the term "feature release" is used to indicate that
this is not just the same thing again.
From a developer's perspective it just means that restrictions on what you can
do are less tight. There are still things that are not allowed, e.g. changing
libraries in a way that makes them incompatible with applications, but on the
application level you can do almost anything you want.
but there is certainly one practical limitation of the
bugfix releases as opposed to feature releases:
* Strings are generally frozen during a six-month bugfix series. This is
to help the various l10n (localization, basically, translation) efforts,
but it DOES mean a tradeoff in terms of fixing things "properly"
sometimes, if that would mean a UI and string change, even if the actual
code fix is reasonably small and "safe" and would otherwise be allowed.
Yes, very good observation. Sometimes an essential bug fix needs a string
change, in which case the translators usually grant an exception [1].
This is actually one reason the distros tend to ship later bugfix
releases instead of newer feature releases
One additional thing might be that distributions themselves use a very similar
development and release model so they have a better understanding what each
step along the way carries with it.
Early bug fix releases of a feature release are basically more like the public
beta of proprietary software, i.e. the beta releases of Free Software products
(and of distributions which do such things) are more like the interal or
private beta.
'Early bug fix' release? I thought that bug fix releases were the minor
versions like 4.8.1, or 4.8.2 etc...
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