[asterisk-dev] Release schedule ?

[Matthew Rubenstein]

	Ubuntu, which is becoming the most popular Linux desktop distro,
releases every 6 months. The project management calls for planning
features which can be delivered in 3-4 months, including bugfixes, and a
list of features for the next release after that. If the first
featureset is finished before the 6 months, then they start the highest
priority of the next releases' featureset. When release time comes, they
have the next release almost certainly finished, and can even be ahead
of the game.

	Everyone (including me) seems to like the 6-month cycle, that is
prompt, but doesn't change too quickly to have stable systems running.
The regularity, the extreme predictability, makes their schedule totally
manageable in the internal schedules of upgraders. That latter benefit
is probably the key to Ubuntu being widely adopted by corporate IT,
which is the key to market dominance. They missed one deadline by a few
weeks, but that lateness was announced more than a month early, so
again, it was all manageable.

	There's also a case for releasing "betas" whenever something major is
finished. Ubuntu started with a pretty mature Debian distro, with a lot
of momentum and a huge global community, and a lot of release management
experience. Asterisk is newer, and more urgent fixes are available
sooner than 6 months. A 6-month major release with interim betas seems
to cover all the requirements of developers, users and everyone's
managers. It takes the pressure off, and the mystery, so everyone can
work together to make each release better. And that grows the community,
and our productivity.


On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 23:29 -0700, asterisk-dev-request at lists.digium.com
wrote:
> Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:01:11 -0600
> From: "Kevin P. Fleming" <kpfleming at digium.com>
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-dev] Release schedule ?
> To: Asterisk Developers Mailing List <asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com>
> Message-ID: <455A58C7.8060404 at digium.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> John Lange wrote:
> > Or does that kind of quick release cycle just make people angry
> because
> > they have to upgrade too often or risk falling woefully behind?
> 
> This is another issue that was brought to my attention when I
> discussed
> the situation with a few people at Astricon a couple of weeks ago.
> 
> Many people are 3-6 months behind on 1.2 updates (in spite of security
> fixes, or they backport only those fixes), and there are still a lot
> of
> people running 1.0.x. The release of 1.4 is not going to cause people
> to
> immediately upgrade, and in fact as the installed base grows, the
> percentage of installations running 'old' (pick your definition)
> releases is going to increase.
> 
> Making 'major' releases every six months will only serve to put more
> pressure on resellers, integrators, etc. who have to figure out how to
> update the systems they maintain... more food for thought, anyway :-)
> 
-- 

(C) Matthew Rubenstein