Time based releases?

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Ian Monroe <ian.monroe at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 2:12 AM, Mark Kretschmann <kretschmann at kde.org> wrote:
>> 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?
>
> We've been doing time based releases for a long time now. Amarok 2.0.0
> was the exception to the rule.
>
> I'm not sure about setting a 2/2 rule, so far we've been setting the
> schedule in a more ad-hoc fashion and I think thats fine. :)

An "ad-hoc fashion" would be the exact opposite of what I was
proposing, if you think about it. It would imply that we wouldn't have
a predictable release cycle, which is exactly what we had before. So
I'm not sure that I can agree with that.

However, if you just mean "let's add a certain amount of flexibility",
this could be talked about. E.g. if we end up with a really buggy
product after four months, then we will probably have to add some more
time for debugging.

But the important point is to at least try sticking to a fixed cycle,
in my opinion.

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