Re: 8.4 release planning

On Wednesday 28 January 2009 12:35:42 Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> writes:
> > On Wednesday 28 January 2009 08:55:56 Magnus Hagander wrote:
> >> We're still going to have to pay the full cost of doing a release every
> >> time. With beta/rc management, release notes, announcements, postings,
> >> packaging and all those things.
> >
> > As I pointed out to Tom, by percentage the additional beta/release cycles
> > wouldn't be very different than what we have now; the more churn you have
> > during development, the longer it takes to beta/release.
>
> I don't believe that thesis in itself, because it ignores economies of
> scale and parallelism for beta testing. And in any case it's complete
> nonsense in respect to back-branch maintenance costs. If we double
> the frequency of releases we are going to be pretty much forced to halve
> the support lifetime, and ain't nobody going to be happy with us.
>

Yes, back branch maintanance is an issue, but I'd bet that as long as we
occasionally designate specific releases as long term support releases (my
guess is 1 every 4 releases, though I haven't done the math), people would be
comfortable with this. We've already had short maintainance windows for
win32 support, and that has gone over without significant uproar. Also other
projects (some much larger than ours) have implemented similar schemes, and
it's been fairly well recieved. People understand the trade-offs of new
features verses stability, and as long as you give them a long term option,
they're happy.

--
Robert Treat
Conjecture: http://www.xzilla.net
Consulting: http://www.omniti.com