[OpenLayers-Dev] moving OL to a scheduled release cycle

[Anselm Hook]

I do observe that the practice of fixed release schedules works well
for OpenBSD.  Developers have become trained to the schedule and plan
their own lives and vacation time around that schedule.

 - a

On 6/9/07, Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt at metacarta.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 09, 2007 at 09:13:54PM +1000, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> > I'm tentatively supportive for a fixed release cycle.
> > A fixed schedule will make planning to use Mapbuilder easier.
> >
> > I'm tentative because:
> > 1. There is a reasonable overhead associated with a release cycle,
> > (managing issues, testing etc). I'm guessing that Chris is offering to
> > provide labour, so in that case this is not an issue.
>
> I think it's actually less work if we make a harder cut-off for
> features. Right now, one of the biggest things that gets decided is
> 'when is it done' -- at least for me. This answers that question. Our
> actual release process is relatively simple: just follow a couple steps
> on a command line, and upload the new tarballs to the server. With
> smaller releases, testing is easier because you're breaking fewer
> things. etc. etc.
>
>
> > 2. What happens if we go through the release cycle, and find a
> > show-stopper bug just before we are due to release? Do we release with
> > the bug or hold off. I'd suggest we should hold off.
>
> Absolutely. No regressions or blockers should be going out in releases,
> even if we're behind on schedule. Sometimes things slip. However, with a
> hard feature freeze 6 weeks in and a target release date of two weeks
> later, that should actually give us time to do testing of things --
> heck, we could even make those testing periods testing binges, where
> developers try to write more automated tests. (It's obvious that our
> current testing is not complete enough, because *no* testing is complete
> enough, but it's actually not that bad.)
>
> It's good to hear tha tyou're positive on this.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Christopher Schmidt
> MetaCarta
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