[Qgis-developer] The case for bugfix releases

[Radim Blazek]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 8:53 AM, Sandro Santilli <strk at keybit.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 08:22:59AM +0200, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
>> Il 29/09/2013 12:48, Jrgen E. Fischer ha scritto:
>> > Anyway, this this is not yet set in stone as I'm currently still sorting out
>> > stuff related to the 2.0 release (e.g. in OSGeo4W) - and therefore didn't have
>> > time to come with draft for this.  So when this actually starts is still TBD.
>>
>> IMHO the new approach from Juergen should solve most of our problem. I understand
>> people may need even more frequent (monthly) backporting of fixes. The only way I see
>> this may become possible is to fund a small team of dedicated backporters, that can
>> also take care of the prodction of binaries.
>
> I think frequent releases mixing features and bugfixes are not going to
> help those whose need is stability.

Agreed, important in this discussion.

> Stability needs bugfix _only_ releases
> as _any_ new feature mines the stability of the software.

We all know that, I think, just nobody has time to maintain bugfix
branch. As Paolo pointed out above, backporters have to be paid. I am
sure that for most sponsors the stability is of high importance, so
let some part of sponsorship is regularly used to pay maintenance of
bugfix branch and releases.

BTW, the reason it took so long to get out 2.0 was API change, we
don't want to break API too frequently but takes long time to get
larger API changes stable. This will happen with 3.0 again.

Radim