Re: Bugs in 0.96 (was Re: 0.96(pre-9) crashes on Windows when insereting a line before ...)

[Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 11:10 +0200, christian ridderstrom gmail com
wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, Lars Clausen wrote:
> 
> >>> Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with the prereleases.
> >> Me too ;-) May I suggest to at least slowdown (preview|bugfix) releases
> >> enough that there is some more time to find, report and fix bugs?
> >
> > You mean three months isn't enough?  Either we're just unlucky, or 
> > there's just too few people trying the pres to get out to enough 
> > corners.
> 
> IMHO, there were too many pre-releses, sometimes with an intervall in 
> between that was too short. This discouraged me as a tester - the time was 
> so short beween releases that I didn't feel I had the time to upgrade to 
> the latest release.

Yes, it got kinda fast towards the end.  Is a week long enough?

> OTOH, I'm perhaps not a regular tester - I occasionally use Dia for work 
> and when I encounter a problem I try to report it. So in my case I need to 
> use something that's reasonably stable.

I don't know that we have any "regular testers":)

> > I'm not worried about putting out too many releases, it's the time spent 
> > between them that seems silly.  Steffen and I have releasing down to a 
> > fairly fast process by now, and with the web pages on a wiki, those can 
> > get updated much faster too.  So I'd prefer to have the prereleases be a 
> > sanity check and just deal more with having post-releases while we 
> > develop the next cool thing.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand you. Do you do the development in two branches, 
> a development branch and a stable branch? (So that if for instance a 
> bug is discovered, it can be fixed in the development branch, backport 
> the fix to the stable branch and eventually do a semi-release?)

More or less.  I'd put the release out fairly fast (basically as soon as
somebody has tried the pre in practice) and then deal with critical bugs
through post-releases.  The bugfixes would then get forward-ported to
the development branch.  This would fit better with the
release-early-release-often philosophy.

-Lars