Timed releases, versions, etc... [was Re: Freeze proto.h?]

[Jim McDonough]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 1:47 AM, Christian Perrier <bubulle at debian.org> wrote:
>  I think that 6 month release timeframe is very ambitious....maybe too
>  ambitious.
Perhaps, but sometimes you have to learn the hard way...

>  I'd love to be proven wrong but my general feeling is that, even with
>  (what I understand to be) the obvious commitment of SerNet to directly
>  or indirectly pay someone so that Samba releases happen, things can
>  change during time....and, still, that makes the release management a
>  huge work....therefore having a 6-month release cycle really hard to
>  achieve.
So one of the key points Jerry makes is that it will take a lot of
discipline...but in what, specifically?  One of the goals is to
provide reduced differences between releases, and I think this is the
part that will take quite a bit of discipline, but will provide better
results.  Developers don't want to support code from even one release
prior because there can be major differences between the releases.
This change could make it easier both for users to upgrade, and
developers to support code older than the latest release only.

But it will definitely require a mind shift from the "Wait, we have to
have _my_ major piece"  mode that currently dominates scheduling of
releases.  The developer who writes the code has to decide if the code
will be ready for the schedule, rather than delaying the schedule (and
everyone's code) until the code is ready.


-- 
Jim McDonough
Samba Team
jmcd at samba dot org
jmcd at themcdonoughs dot org