"Chad" innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote in message news:BANLkTi=mwb7GdCfZfTm4VxbwLn3iKStw+w@mail.gmail.com...
On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 12:43 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote: Tim was concerned about the release notes, but as I pointed out in my previous e-mail, Sam's tidied this up (and it's low-hanging fruit if someone wants to check behind us for sanity). That being said, I don't see any reason why we can't drop a beta1 sometime this week. Give it a week, and drop a beta2. Wait another week, then go final I think, all depending on what response we get from the betas.
+1
As for 1.18, I say we branch it the same day we drop 1.17 final (making the branch is easy).
+1. I think porting 1.17 fixes to 1.18 is a much lesser evil than allowing the 1.18 branch to get any bigger.
There's still quite a bit of code to review, but going ahead and giving ourselves a cutoff point will make catching up easier. Large projects still outstanding in 1.18 to review are the img_metadata merge, and rewrites of Skin and Action code.
The plan *was* to revert the Action rewrite from 1.18 and put it into 1.19. If that's not going to happen then we should probably either a) push on with its development and try and get it fully in place for 1.18, b) (my preference) stabilise what's already there and leave it as a partially-used-framework like Message, or c) revert it altogether. We can't roll it back out of 1.18 *and* 1.19.
Looking ahead to 1.19, I'd like to do the same and branch soon after 1.18 has been dropped.
+1
Going back over the past couple of releases, we've had quite a few "rewrites" of major portions of code. While these are a necessary part of the process of developing MW, they are difficult to review due to their complexity. This complexity also makes it more likely for things to break. If I may be so bold, I would like to ask that 1.19 not contain any of these rewrites. Let's focus on making it a bugfix/cleanup release. Personally I think it would make for a very clean and polished release, as well as reducing the time for us to review and ship it.
+0 -- I don't have time in the next six months to take the hedgecutters to anything else in the codebase anyway... :-D
If we go this route, I don't see any reason we couldn't ship 1.19 by year end (or if we really push, 11.11.11, as the other thread suggested). I think it would put us in a really good place to move forward into 2012, and help get us back into a somewhat regular release pattern.
If it helps with getting onto a regular release pattern, then that's good. We need to be careful that that doesn't come at the expense of Useful Stuff Not Getting Done: it would be very easy to maintain a release schedule if we never added any new features, but it would be fairly pointless. I do understand what you mean, and I think it would be a worthwhile exercise; just as long as we treat it as an experiment.
I really would love to hear from people to see if they think I'm crazy or if this could work out fairly well. I know it's pretty tl;dr for most people, but the ones who read it are the ones I wanna hear from anyway ;-)
I approve of this response-filtration scheme... :-D
--HM