[Qgis-developer] Four month cycle too fast

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Nathan,

On Thu, 19. Jun 2014 at 19:32:17 +1000, Nathan Woodrow wrote:
> I'm not sure I really like the "just make new releases and avoid bug fixe
> releases" kind of thinking.  There are some places that can't roll out a
> whole new release due to possible bugs from major new features, and given how
> fast we move this can cause some real issues.

I said "compromise".  I'm sure that I don't like it.  It implies that it's not
optimal. But I didn't have a better idea - and apparently I also miss all the
new stuff in this discussion - feels like a dejavu.

> We don't even have to bug fix until next release just do it for a short (1
> month) period after the release, so you're dev cycle is like this:

That means packaging again and again - and that's what I want to avoid.

But I thought about an automated release build when there are new commits in
the release branch and a automated bugfix release after a some given period of
time without any new commits.

That period should be long enough to make it likely that potentially newly
introduced issues by the bugfix are spotted and fixed (thereby restarting the
period) before its over.

And that without further doing except for the backported commit.  But I didn't
find time to do that yet.

> 6 month dev (including ~1 month freeze) -> release -> 1 month post release
> freeze -> release a bug fix release if needed -> move on.

7 months is not good as that would move the schedule into undesireable areas
(like holidays) over time.


> Packaging for each platform is up to that maintainer but that should be
> automated as much as possible really otherwise making releases is too hard.

Um, but I've spoken to most of the debian, ubuntu, ubuntugis, windows
maintainers and they all agree with me - I think they already have don't a good
job to automated it a good deal, but it's still not fully automated and
therefore they are not comfortable with doing it again and again.  ;)



Jürgen

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