Time based releases?

[Mark Kretschmann]

Ahoy maties!

So we've recently been discussing something on IRC. The gist of it:
"Hey, everybody is moving to time based release schedules. Let's do it
too!"

I've been proposing doing something like a "2/2" scheme: 2 months
features, 2 months bug fixing, which would leave us with an
approximately 4 months cycle. Some others on IRC agreed to this scheme
too, in general.

I don't really feel like discussing the pros and cons of time based
releases here, since it has been discussed so often all over the
Internet. But I think it's becoming a very evident trend that many
projects are moving in this direction (Ubuntu, SUSE, GNOME, KDE, and
today I learned that FFmpeg is doing it too [1]).

Basically I believe that the days of "release it when it's done" are
over. That was the 90s and such, and that was Perl 6, Duke Nukem
Forever, The Hurd. And now it's 2009, and it's become evident that
time based releases are mostly better.


Thoughts?


[1] http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13589

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
www.kde.org - amarok.kde.org