Re: Countdown to branch?

On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 11:51 +1100, msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> Right. I find it hard to keep my ambitions to scale. Since I'm still
> learning how to build Word Processors it's hard for me to judge how much
> extra time is needed to bullet-proof features. I'll write out my list of
> hoped-for-features in 2.4 in another email.
>
> Maybe we can do a "it's two months to a release, no new features now!"
> policy, I might not break it this time.
>

I think you've got the idea, but explicitly: The problem is not so much
that two months isn't enough time as that the ambitions are not kept to
scale (and it's not just you by any measure). So when the two month
mark hits, you have dozens of 'open' features by developers working on
too many new things at the same time, so even if the freeze isn't
violated there's just too much unfinished business for two months (when
you take into account that nobody gets to work on abi more than a few
hours a week). And yes, not violating the freeze however long it is
would also be rather helpful.

> Well my productivity has fallen off for various reasons over the last few
> months. Much of the drop is due to effects unrelated to AbiWord but a bit
> of it is. I am more interested in doing fun new features and reworking
> core of the application a bit. Especially as I keep fixing "we can't
> insert that thing at this document point bugs". I am itching to do some
> 2.4 work soon.

But my point (one of them anyway) is that your original approach,
postponing the bugs that needed to be postponed and downgrading the ones
that needed to be downgraded, makes a lot more sense (or would have
before) than just picking a date with a dart and a calendar. As
developers realized that they wouldn't have that much time, or didn't
have the patience they originally thought they would, they should have
indicated so in bugzilla, so we wouldn't have to be having this
discussion now.

In any case, "soon" needs to be defined. Do you personally (I think I
know how tomas feels) think soon means today, this weekend, next week,
next blue moon? (no tomas, I'm not being serious about next blue moon
(: )

> It's also good that we continually re-examine our processes to see if they
> can be improved.

Hear hear.

> However if Marc is happy to be our prime back-porter and maintainer for
> 2.2 I think we're in good shape to launch into 2.4 whenever he's happy for
> that to happen.

I think it might be a good idea for his non-abi-related issues to be to
the side first, or at least for him to be given a chance to contemplate
and respond at his leisure (this rash action business really gets me
blood boilin' mate (: ). I know I would appreciate that much.

> My own preference is that we branch after 2.2.3 but I'll leave that to the
> 2.2 maintainer.

Sounds acceptable to me.

> MG, thanks very, very much for guiding us through 2.2. I really appreciate
> your efforts and I do need cajoling and lecturing from time to time to
> keep me on the rails. It's extemely hard to heard us cats in roughly the
> right direction.

You know how I so love playing qa's advocate.

Regards
-MG
Received on Thu Dec 30 04:57:53 2004