[Qgis-developer] Is the new release schedule a success?

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Tom,

On Tue, 30. Jun 2015 at 11:14:57 -0700, Tom Chadwin wrote:
> This post is in no way a criticism of any of the QGIS team and their
> monumental efforts or their fabulous product. However, I thought someone
> should question how successful the four-monthly release schedule is. 2.8
> immediately needed 2.8.1, and there seems to be the chance that 2.10 is
> immediately going to need 2.10.1.

> Is the predestined release schedule meaning that the devs simply cannot test
> as much as they need? Alternatively, should the feature freeze be extended?

In an open source project I see testing more a job for users and not for devs.
That's why we have all those nightly builds that users could test.  In feature
freeze the users should test more, report and the devs should fix what's
reported.

If the devs also had do all the testing (including coming up with all sorts of
environments), we'd probably never got as far as we are.  We're only a few
devs, but a lot of users.  While that usually applies to all software, I
imagine that our ratio is still different.

I might be wrong, but to me the fact that 2.8 and 2.10 instantly needed a point
release is more a sign that still not enough people (ie. users) participate in
testing QGIS before the release.

If all the opportunity of preliminary testing was used, the .0 rule ideally
wouldn't even apply to us.  As we'd all work together to get master into a good
state to release - and after the release just establish that we've done a good
job on it.

I doubt that revising the schedule would change that - but it might just make
investing in features less attractive.

Still if we find there are more serious reports during feature freeze than we
can cope with, we can see if the schedule need revision - but I think that this
wasn't the case in either 2.8 or 2.10.
 

Jürgen

-- 
Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden             http://www.norbit.de
QGIS release manager (PSC)  Germany                    IRC: jef on FreeNode                         
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 827 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/attachments/20150630/53207745/attachment.pgp>