next release and release pace in general

[Cyrille Berger Skott]

Hi,

Here is my opinion on release schedule. First, we have to go back and think 
about why we do release ? And more important, to whom we do release ? For me, 
it is obvious that we primarly release to bring improvements to our users, 
everything else is and should be a side effect.

== Targeting users

Then we have to know our users, and the following is based uniquely on my 
experience with talking with other people, technical, and non-technical, young 
or older, if someone had a study on the subject, I would be very interested to 
read it, but anyway, I would say there are two categories of users, those who 
don't want any changes at all in the software they use and those who like to 
see improvements. Personnaly, I think that when we release, we can safely 
ignore the first group of users, there is no law that say that a user have to 
upgrade, hence that group of users is well served by a fast or a slow release 
cycle.

For the second group of users, it seems to me, that they appreciate 
improvements, weather features or bug fixing, and would strongly dislike 
disruptive changes (major UI overhaul and regressions). But to be honest, that 
would be true for any release schedule length. To be honest, based on that, I 
would even be suggesting monthly release, continuously bringing features and 
bug fixing, but that would be a QA nightmare.

== The competition

This assumptions about users appreciating continuous non-disruptive 
improvements, that have led Google to release Chrome every six weeks, Firefox 
is also now following that schedule. The Linux Kernel get a major release 
every four weeks. If you look at web site and web applications, they get 
continuous improvements that are silently rolled to users. This is the current 
trend in the industry, release early and release often.

== Splash

I don't think release should be used for making a "splash", I fail to see the 
benefit for our users, also, we would have to define what is a "splash", same 
with defining important features: what is an important feature for someone is 
completely unimportant for someone else, also, developers tend to vastly 
overestimate the time it will take to complete a feature, which is the problem 
with goal-oriented features, they keep dragging on, waiting for some features 
to be finished.

So yes, our releases announcement looks like they don't contain so much. My 
suggestion would be that once a year we write (rather collect) a small leaflet 
with all the new features and improvements that have happen during the last 
year, pretty much like Krita's leaflet (http://krita.org/aboutkrita26.pdf). 
And then we send that to the press, along with a presskit, and I am rather 
convinced that it will be much more efficient at attracting attention than 
waiting for having sufficient features to do a release.

== Reaching users

Fedora and Ubuntu are on a six months schedule with freeze early March and 
early September. OpenSuse is on a 8 months schedule. However, rolling 
distributions are getting increasingly popular, with Gentoo and ArchLinux, 
Debian has started discussing it, Ubuntu is rumured to introduce it soon. Also 
most distributions offers backport of the latest software.

And that is only Linux, but the hard truth is that if Calligra become 
successful, most of its users will be Windows user, where we are not dependent 
on distributions release schedule.

-- 
Cyrille Berger Skott