Subject: Re: towards a release process that Just Works
From: Håkan Waara (hwaara@chello.se)
Date: Thu Aug 16 2001 - 14:58:55 CDT
Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Quoting Paul Rohr <paul@abisource.com>:
>
>
>> At 11:40 AM 8/16/01 -0400, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>>
>>> This sort of thing *really* needs to stop happening. We *need* to
>>>
>> release a
>>
>>> 0.9.3 ASAP with HTML export bugfixes and without the MSVC msvcrt.dll
>>>
>>>
>> dependency.
>>
>> I'd actually like to go one step further here, and assert that the
>> "rapid release" process we've been using for the 0.9.x series so
>> far does *not*
>>
>> Just Work.
>>
>
> Having a release manager and coordinators and all of those other jobs
> that Paul mentioned would be great. Right now, we don't have that,
> and people to fill those kinds of jobs are traditionally hard to
> find. And until we find people to fill those roles, we will have
> to make a tough decision, which ultimately amounts to:
>
> Are Dom's, Martin's, Hub's, ... times better spent coding, designing,
> bugfixing, helping users, ... or do they have a few days where
> they can devote all of their time going through a worthwile yet
> tedious and time-consuming release process. This is compounded
> further when we're releasing a new build every week and a half.
I think the long-term fix for both this problem and Paul's rule #1 (The
user hears about it everywhere.) is to not release too often.
If you release too often, people will not see big differences,
news-sources such as slashdot won't bother posting a comment, and you
have to go through this tedious process.
My little proposal is to *increase* the time between each release and
spend time fixing bugs to the next release.
While ``Release Early and Often'' might work in Linux world, it's a
whole different thing when it comes to real-world users.
Not only would this boost performance in bug fixin', it would also make
the releases more "famous" because the press would see big improvements.
Thanks.
PS.
Sorry that I haven't introduced myself, here goes:
I'm Håkan Waara and am working on Mozilla.org's mail-news part. I became
interested in AbiWord not only for its XP-ness but also for the quality
of the documentation on the site and the easy-to-use (well, that's
arguable, but at least compared to most Linux apps...) interface. :)
-- Håkan Waara (hwaara@chello.se)
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