Releases in 3 months

[Luigi Toscano]

On Wednesday 10 of July 2013 17:43:38 Àlex Fiestas wrote:
> On Tuesday 09 July 2013 21:57:51 Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > On Tuesday 09 July 2013, Sven Brauch wrote:
> > > I think Nuno's point is very interesting and worth thinking about. To
> > > stick with the firefox example, since they started releasing every
> > > ortography fix in the settings dialog as a new major version, I think
> > > attention in the media to their releases has declined a lot -- nobody
> > > cares any more that a new version of firefox was released since it
> > > happens every three days.
> > 
> > that's my impression too.
> 
> I can't comment on promo strategies, but I can comment on news since I read
> a lot of them.
> 
> FF pointless releases get small coverage, FF releases containing interesting
> features get the same coverage as they did before. For example:
> 
> Firefox 201 has speed improvements and security fixes. This one appears
> barely.
> 
> Firefox 202 contains new interface. This one appears everywhere as old
> firefox releases did.
> 
> Actually, in the old fashion FF releases only the most important changes
> (like new interface) got press coverage anyway... so not much have changed.

I can't say it was the same for everyone. In the old time, before the run 
after FF4, I used to read the complete changelog checking for the news. After 
the run, I only see the headlines like "fixes blabla and this new feature" and 
that's it, without digging in, especially when you start to hear the future 
features of the next version in beta or the next+1 in alpha. A lot overlapped 
news, I'm never sure which version has what feature and I give up.

This brings to my mind also another problem. This race with version numbers 
just to follow Chrome (and have bigger version number than Emacs) can bring 
more confusion. In the case of Chromium it brings also other problem 
(dependencies on newer unpatched versions) which makes things even more 
complicated for packaging, unless you take the entire precompiled block. This 
partially (lot less) happen also on FF, but it's still a problem. This is not 
a problem in the KDE world, but if the idea is to follow "the web stuff" like 
this, it can makes thing complicated for people not "leaving on the edge" with 
the last version of the applications. 

The more you go down in the stack, the more you need stability, and no, it's 
not true that with short release time the features will be smaller with less 
bugs, because a feature could have been in development for a long time, so 
it's not so small. You can say that there is more time for testing it, but 
then something can go wrong in the integration phase (and it happens, that's 
why the companies invest in QA departments).

Ciao
-- 
Luigi