[Qgis-developer] Stress about release plans

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Bo,

On Tue, 22. Jul 2014 at 17:17:43 +0200, Bo Victor Thomsen wrote:
> Furthermore: Every new release contains - of course - new features and  
> bug fixes. But with the addition of new features you always get some new  
> bugs;  both in the new features but occasionally in some _existing,  
> previously functioning_ part of QGIS.

We had that in 1.7 even without new feature - backported fixes introduced new
bugs.

> The current release cycle look roughly like this:

> 1. Development phase, 3 months of adding new features and bug fixes to
>    QGIS in a developer version of QGIS
> 2. Feature freeze, 1 month cleaning and polishing the developer
>    version, i.e. bug fixing the new features and removing old bugs.
>    Updating of translations.
> 3. Release of the developer version as the new stable version of QGIS
>    and start of a new developer version of QGIS
> 4. 1 month of reporting and bug fixing the new stable release and a
>    probably a second minor release of the new version

Currently we do three months of development, 1 months of testing and fixing,
then we releases and start the next development phase.  There is no set plan
for backporting and/or point/bugfix releases.

So just two phases - but yes, three releases a year.

> My suggestion is that *one* of the three version cycles is replaced with  
> the following:

> 1. Development phase, *1* month of adding new features and bug fixes to
>    QGIS in a developer version of QGIS

One month is too short.

> 2. Bug fixing only feature freeze, *3* months cleaning and polishing
>    the developer version, i.e. bug fixing the new features and removing old
>    bugs with *special care* taken for finding and removing bugs introduced in
>    the last two cycles. Updating of translations.

> 3. Release of the developer version as the new stable version of QGIS
>    and start of a new developer version of QGIS

> 4. *1* month of reporting and bugfixing the new stable release and a
>    with a *guaranteed* second minor release of the new version.

That means 5 months in total - that's also a problem, because the 4 month
period is scheduled to avoid holidays.  5 months would make sure that they
eventually get in the way.

That means one more releases a year (2x development, 2x bugfix releases instead
of 3) and one month of parallel work on two branches.  Well the latter might
mean that the parallel month doesn't count and we still have three periods a
year - but that would then mean three more releases a year.



Jürgen

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Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
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QGIS release manager (PSC)  Germany                    IRC: jef on FreeNode                         

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