On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 3:05 AM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
Looking ahead to 1.19, I'd like to do the same and branch soon after 1.18 has been dropped. Since 1.19's a little further out and hasn't started taking shape yet, I'd like to go ahead and propose what sort of release we should aim for.
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.
I like this idea, although it does mean pushing back the iwtransclusion branch merge to 1.20, presumably. But then you say:
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).
We'd be branching 1.18 in mid-May (when 1.17 goes final). If we release a beta of 1.19 in November and it's a small release, we should branch in October (or branch in November and release by year end). That means there'd be 5 or 6 months of development in 1.19. I'm on board with shooting for a clean and polished release, but we shouldn't make /any/ release longer than 4 months, and this one should probably be 3 IMO. Also, 6 months is a long time for a ban on rewrites.
I've seen a few suggestions about release schedules on this list now, and all of them seem to, implicitly or explicitly, accept that releases contain outrageous amounts of code and take more than 3 months to stabilize, just because that's what happened with 1.17. Instead, I'd like us to be ambitious about not repeating the 1.17 fiasco, and aiming for a shorter cycle. Tim is right in the other thread that cycles can be too short, but I think once every 3-4 months is good middle ground. In any case, if stabilizing a release to even get it to the first beta takes more than a month, something is fundamentally wrong IMO.
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.
I agree and applaud this goal, though per the above I'm not entirely sure we mean the same thing when we say "regular release pattern".
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)