[Qgis-developer] Four month cycle too fast

[Matthias Kuhn]

Good to hear that there are organizations putting money into QA. Thanks 
a lot.

I think there are different categories of users, experimental early 
adopters and organizations going for stability at the expense of 
waiting longer for new features.

To get the best for both, LTS releases may be a good option. One LTS 
branch every 8 or 12 months which gets fixes backported and 1 or 2 
other releases in between which work the way we currently have it.

Advantages are
New features get tested in the in-between releases (they will get used 
because they are not called experimental or testing or rc).
Big organizations use the same LTS release (in comparison to the 
general advice of "take every second release" which will bring one org 
to use the Jun release and the other one the Feb release) and can 
collaborate with bugfixing
Backports of bugfixes have always to be done for one specific/defined 
version. (In comparison: if a company skips release 2.6 they are still 
with 2.4 in the 2.7 period, and nobody will backport to 2.4 at that 
stage)

Best,
Matthias

On Don 19 Jun 2014 12:33:01 CEST, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> Il 19/06/2014 12:19, Andreas Neumann ha scritto:
>
>> I'd like to add to the discussion that there will be more organizations
>> investing in bug-fixing in the future. Yesterday, a Swiss canton told me
>> that they will invest 5000 CHF each year in QA/bugfixing in the future.
>> I am pretty sure that more organizations will follow.
>
> Wonderful, this is the way to go IMHO.
>
>> But it is important that we will provide bug-fix releases and that there
>> is a reasonable time available for testing. The short releases do not
>> help at all for organizations - because each new release introduces more
>> and different bugs.
>
> The above mentioned resources could be used for maintaining a stable branch, and
> backporting.
>
>> We users need bug-free software more than a predictable release date. We
>> don't need QGIS at an exact specific time. But we cannot accept that
>> some features are broken that are key to our work.
>
> Agreed fully: that's what Blocker category is for.
> All the best, and thanks for this important discussion.
>