Re: 8.5 release timetable, again

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 4:39 AM, Ron Mayer<rm_pg(at)cheapcomplexdevices(dot)com> wrote:
> Josh Berkus wrote:
>> There's some very good reasons for the health of the project to have
>> specific release dates and stick to them.
>
> Help me understand why?
>
> The Linux kernel seems to do fine with a "when it is ready" cycle,
> where some releases(2.6.24) take twice the time of others(2.6.28)[1,2].
> I imagine it has similar stability and lack-of-data-loss requirements
> as postgres does.

Uhm, the Linux release process is actually now the canonical example
of time-based release management. They used to do "when it is ready"
and that led to such a dramatic catastrophic failure with 2.6 that
they adopted the most dogmatically time-based system of any open
source project.

They basically don't do any integration testing and leave that up to
the distributions now. Instead they have an "rc" release *every week*
like clockwork and every 2-3 months the last one becomes a new version
regardless of whether there's any notable new feature.

Other than the first few releases after 2.6.0 when things were still
fairly unstable and major fixes were going in the release cycle has
been remarkaby regular modulo holidays and vacations:

r | d | days
------------------+------------+------
ChangeLog-2.6.30 | 2009-06-10 | 79
ChangeLog-2.6.29 | 2009-03-23 | 89
ChangeLog-2.6.28 | 2008-12-24 | 75
ChangeLog-2.6.27 | 2008-10-10 | 89
ChangeLog-2.6.26 | 2008-07-13 | 87
ChangeLog-2.6.25 | 2008-04-17 | 84
ChangeLog-2.6.24 | 2008-01-24 | 107
ChangeLog-2.6.23 | 2007-10-09 | 92
ChangeLog-2.6.22 | 2007-07-09 | 74
ChangeLog-2.6.21 | 2007-04-26 | 81
ChangeLog-2.6.20 | 2007-02-04 | 67
ChangeLog-2.6.19 | 2006-11-29 | 70
ChangeLog-2.6.18 | 2006-09-20 | 94
ChangeLog-2.6.17 | 2006-06-18 | 90
ChangeLog-2.6.16 | 2006-03-20 | 76
ChangeLog-2.6.15 | 2006-01-03 | 67
ChangeLog-2.6.14 | 2005-10-28 | 60
ChangeLog-2.6.13 | 2005-08-29 | 73
ChangeLog-2.6.12 | 2005-06-17 | 107
ChangeLog-2.6.11 | 2005-03-02 | 68
ChangeLog-2.6.10 | 2004-12-24 | 66
ChangeLog-2.6.9 | 2004-10-19 | 66
ChangeLog-2.6.8 | 2004-08-14 | 59
ChangeLog-2.6.7 | 2004-06-16 | 37
ChangeLog-2.6.6 | 2004-05-10 | 36
ChangeLog-2.6.5 | 2004-04-04 | 24
ChangeLog-2.6.4 | 2004-03-11 | 22
ChangeLog-2.6.3 | 2004-02-18 | 14
ChangeLog-2.6.2 | 2004-02-04 | 26
ChangeLog-2.6.1 | 2004-01-09 | 22
ChangeLog-2.6.0 | 2003-12-18 |
(31 rows)

--
greg
http://mit.edu/~gsstark/resume.pdf