[Qgis-developer] Release plans

[Sandro Santilli]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 04:30:44PM +1000, Nathan Woodrow wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Sandro Santilli <strk at keybit.net> wrote:

> It's like saying you can't say "apples are ripe!" because then people get
> > frustrated by not finding them on their supermarket shelf.
> 
> This is incorrect.  The "apples are ripe" is current master after freeze,
> might be some bugs still but it's pretty good.  A better compare is saying
> "Extra! We have apples ready to go,....*goes to shop*.tomorrow". We are the
> shop.

"Ready to go" is when apples leave the tree.
That'd be a tag in contrast to a branch (like "master").

I went looking at the 2.2.0 announcement, it's here:
http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2014-February/031125.html

It clearly states that only the source code was made available, but I think
it was an error not to give a direct link to the source tarball.
Instead, the link generically points to the homepage of qgis.org, from which
it is even hard to find the source tarball. Is maybe that the reason why
people get frustrated.
I tried finding today (tarball for 2.2.0) and still don't see it:
http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html
The "sources" tab points to the main github page:
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS
>From there you have to find your way into "releases":
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/releases
And you have to "guess" that "2.2.0" is called "final-2_2_0", which
has a description of "Version 2.2" (no patch-level) and no release notes.

After some more research, I tried following the "Older releases of QGIS"
link, from the "ALL RELEASES" tab in the download page, and finally found:
http://qgis.org/downloads/, from which a more serious-looking package
is found:

  http://qgis.org/downloads/qgis-2.2.0.tar.bz2

With it's signature:

  http://qgis.org/downloads/qgis-2.2.0.tar.bz2.md5

I think those two links should have been put into the announcement,
plus a link to the "release notes".

Those are the apples on the ground, ready to be picked up by
packagers that would wrap them in different boxes for different
markets.

The announcement mail could give more evidence to a WARNING: do not go
to shops *tomorrow* as you're not likely to find them, but you're welcome
to come and pick the apples from the ground, biological, at km 0 :)

> Having dealt with people confused about the release my opinion is this is
> bad publicity for the project. I'm not just making it up it's from
> experience and having t o deal with it.

Confusion is never good.
Myself I find qgis developers roles pretty confusing if they are expected
to both produce the good and also give it different "dresses" for users of
different markets. Where's the package for AmigaOS, btw ? Should we wait for
ie before shipping those apples ?

--strk;