[Live-demo] Should OSGeo-Live drop from 2 to 1 release per year?

[Johan Van de Wauw]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 12:44 AM, Cameron Shorter
<cameron.shorter at lisasoft.com> wrote:
>
> Extending impromptu IRC discussion today ...
>
> With the increased maturity and stability of OSGeo-Live we are considering
> reducing the OSGeo-Live release cycle to once a year, releasing just before
> the global FOSS4G. (Previously we have been releasing twice per year).

Cameron,

I do see some value in keeping two releases per year:
* contributors may have more time during one part of the year than
others, eg the second release falls during christmas holidays which
can be an advantage and a disadvantage
* changes are more incremental, which gives more chances to catch
errors early, more testing
* contributors have two deadlines :-) Eg someone may start working now
to add a new project to osgeo live. If we will only release next year
she/he will probably not start yet.

Rather than switching to only one release we could switch to a
"tic-tac" release where we add major changes in one release (tic) and
keep more things stable for the other release(tac). This may also free
up some time to add new features as long as they don't affect the core
system. We could eg keep versions of base components such as gdal and
postgres stable during the "tac" release.

In the minimal scenario a tac release could exist just of security
updates and documentation updates, but I guess components without
reverse dependencies can be updated here as well. Or we could work on
new features (eg notebooks, jsfiddle like examples for javascript,
...) which don't affect the base system.

I should add I have not been very active in the core team, so I guess
the real decision is up to them.

Kind Regards,
Johan