Subject: Cool stuff & release plans
From: Patrick Lam (plam@plam.lcs.mit.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 12 2001 - 19:11:52 CDT
On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> I view this as a damn good reason to postpone a 0.9 or 1.0 release
> indefinitely. There is a *lot* of cool stuff going on in the tree now, and
> I'm inclined to let it all keep happening (and make as much as possible
> happen as I can).
>
> A hurried 1.0 does not mean a good product... To quote the SG motto - "1.0
> isn't the end, it's the beginning." But I'd rather have a 1.0 with much more
> than they (or even we) had anticipated, and I think that our users would
> agree. 1.0 by year's end would be a good timeframe, IMNSHO.
>
> To that effect, I'd be more than happy to release a 0.8.0 in another few
> weeks and begin a new development series - "0.8.0 - the road to 0.9.0". I
> don't like our current numbering scheme at all.
So there's certainly some merit to this idea. We should consider the
drawbacks too. If we think that the flaws not too serious then we should
go ahead and release 0.8.0.
If we release a 1.0 then we're saying that we have something that we think
is useful and can do real things. It should also be reasonably free of
bugs. I think that people do download a 1.0 release more than a 0.8
release because there's some expectation that it's `finished' in some
sense.
Something that needs to be done at some point is a big bug-fixing
spree; our bug count has recently tended to keep going up, not down. It's
easier to fix bugs in a simpler system, so that the longer we wait, the
harder it's going to be to get something stable.
We certainly want the cool new things going in to appear at some
point, and if we freeze the tree then we lose some of that momentum. In
particular, freezing just after GUADEC when everyone is full of
inspiration is probably a terrible idea.
But we should probably at some point rationally look at the features we
want to add before 1.0 and decide if we really need them right now or not.
pat
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