[Mono-dev] [Ximian-mono-list] 2 Mono releases a year...

[Atsushi Eno]

I support Zoltan on having more frequent releases, but I also agree to
having just two releases per year. Current QA activity is too much work
to be done for 4 releases.

My primary concern with QA is that "QA" in those Novell speak unlike OSS
community does not mean bugfixes and they are completely left to
hackers, which means they interrupt our hacking time as frequent QA
time. It also makes our releases too professional to get more
contributors involved. So it actually harms us.
Current QA team is even ignorant of which code is relevant to ongoing
regression. So the team doesn't do what community does. Though it is not
wrong and/or impossible to fix.
I rather expect them to work on some other stuff such as improving
monobuild etc.

Hence I think it is better to have more beta releases but without QA
team i.e. provide tag and release only tarballs, optionally packages
to somewhere that we mark as "unstable" (if someone wants to do).
And more importantly we announce this release style change to the
community, as they expect "betas" like our stable releases.

It's closer to what we used to do in Mono 0.xx era, which I liked very
much, felt community involved, than nowadays.

On releasing stable packages less, I've pointed out earlier there is
almost nothing which are done while listed as 2.4 feature (I've expected
more discussion would arise on that matter, but it didn't). We used to
cook future plans too optimistic, while in reality we all are bound to
maintenance and interrupting work. So I support two releases per year.

Atsushi Eno


Andrew Jorgensen wrote:
> We have customers.  When you say "leave some of the QA work to our users" you're really saying "leave some of the QA work to our paying customers".  This is not an option.  We want to improve the quality of Mono, not diminish it.
> 
> Also some of that time is build and installer maintenance, and appliance build, etc. etc..
> 
> Also it doesn't make a lot of sense to release more often than the major distributions do.  Our point (our meaning the provo team) is that we can't actually move forward at the rate we're going with the resources we have.  We can't even keep up.  There are a number of things on our eternal to do lists that we likely will never do.  And each release it seems that one of those items becomes something that we absolutely must do.
> 
>>>> "Zoltan Varga" <vargaz at gmail.com> 12/08/08 5:02 PM >>>
> Hi,
> 
>   I would suggest the opposite: do releases more frequently, and leave
> some of the QA work
> to our users, as is traditionally done by an OSS project.
> 
>                                   Zoltan
> 
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 12:55 AM, Thomas Wiest <twiest at novell.com> wrote:
>> Hey Guys,
>>    The build and test team is struggling to keep up with all of our
>> obligations (and our task lists just keep growing). The only way I can
>> see being able to get ahead is to reduce the number of Mono releases we
>> do a year. Right now we've been trying to do 4 releases a year (it looks
>> like it's going to be closer to 3 in the short term).
>>
>>    I propose that we start doing only 2 Mono releases a year. This will
>> allow the build and test team a lot more time in between releases to
>> keep up with the tasks we've been asked to do.
>>
>> So, the question is, if we start doing 2 releases a year, what are the
>> negative affects of this?
>>
>> Since the major distros and gnome only have 2 releases a year also, I
>> would think the impact would be fairly minimal. Am I wrong?
>>
>>
>> Thomas
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ximian-mono-list mailing list
>> Ximian-mono-list at lists.ximian.com
>> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/ximian-mono-list
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Ximian-mono-list mailing list
> Ximian-mono-list at lists.ximian.com
> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/ximian-mono-list
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ximian-mono-list mailing list
> Ximian-mono-list at lists.ximian.com
> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/ximian-mono-list
>