[Qgis-developer] Four month cycle too fast

[Denis Rouzaud]

I think that LTS is kind of a really good idea.

At some extent, it's what Sourcepole is doing with its QGIS enterprise.
If we have enough companies paying for such bugfixes & QA, that would be 
easily feasible, but someone should be in charge of handling this.

Then, the cycle is another discussion. It could be either 2 or 3 
releases a year, with 1 over 2 or 3 being LTS.

But I would definitely investigate the idea of the LTS.

Greetings,
Denis


On 19.06.2014 12:44, Matthias Kuhn wrote:
> 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.
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-developer mailing list
> Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer