[asterisk-dev] Re: Release schedule ?

[Tony Mountifield]

In article <4554B15E.5010701 at digium.com>,
Russell Bryant <russell at digium.com> wrote:
> 
> After 1.4.0 is finally over with, I think it is worth continuing discussion 
> about our release process.  The way we did it this go around hasn't been so 
> great.  The part that hurt the most, in my opinion, is that we stuck with the 
> original schedule in terms of "architecture freezes" and "feature freezes", but 
> not in making the actual release.  That means that our development branch spent 
> probably half of 2006 in some degree of freeze.  That really stalled 
> development.  Also, I think this painfully drawn out process has hurt morale in 
> the development community a bit, as well.  Asterisk is my only experience in a 
> large open source project.  I would be interested in learning about the 
> processes used within other projects to see how we can improve the way we do 
> things for the next development cycle.

I agree the 1.4 release process has been a problem, but I think the problem
has been a little different that you described.

It is ages ago since the 1.4 branch was created. Since then, there has been
a huge amount of activity from developers in trunk, while 1.4 has been waiting
and waiting... and waiting, with quite a lot of time between beta releases.

My opinion is that a better scheme would have been:

* Decide when trunk contains the features desired for 1.4
* Don't create a 1.4 branch yet, but put a feature freeze on trunk.
* Have ALL available developers work on fixing the remaining bugs in trunk,
  instead of spending time on new features. This should greatly reduce the
  length of the feature freeze. Beta releases could be made during this
  time, but the 1.4 beta period is not a time to be working on new post-1.4
  features instead.
* Create 1.4 as a snapshot of trunk and release it *at that time*.
* Only then have developers resume working on new features in trunk.

Just my 2p.

Cheers
Tony
-- 
Tony Mountifield
Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org