Tels wrote:
With Perl v5.8.x there are now fixed release deadlines and they are strictly adhered to, which resulted in quite a bit of released versions - currently 5.8.7 is at the door.
Remember we've been doing two to three major version releases a year, which is not absurdly slow. Fashionably 'aggressive' projects like Gnome, Fedora Core, etc are generally targetting similar 6-month release intervals, which people sometimes complain are too fast. :)
mediawiki-stable: 2003-08-29 1.1.0: 2003-12-08 1.2.0: 2004-03-24 1.3.0: 2004-08-12 1.4.0: 2005-03-20 [approx]
That's IMHO much better than having v1.4 "nearly ready" since 2004-12-03 :)
Well, I wouldn't say it's been "nearly ready" since December 3. A *lot* of important bug fixes got done over the next three months, fixes which happened because we rolled it out into use in an environment where it would get a lot of stress testing and where we could deploy our fixes immediately at a point where we wouldn't dare declare it ready for the public. :)
Many people don't keep up with releases well once they've set up their sites, so I'm pretty leery about releasing a new 'stable' version too early.
However I had hoped to get a formal release out a bit earlier than this (and would have done so last month, had I not run into security bugs I wanted to do further testing and investigation on; that lead me to put out a release candidate instead of a final release). I'll go ahead and push out 1.4.0 tomorrow; I'm pretty happy with the current state.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)