Re: [Evolution-hackers] Reconsidering our release cycle

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist net>]

On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 10:58 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> My concern is that it could also be longer before new features and
> fixes actually make it into a release. For example, if we were on an
> annual schedule and people were still using Evolution 3.6 today
> instead of Evolution 3.8.... we'd still be having to kill
> evolution-source-registry after connecting to the VPN if we actually
> want to see our calendars.
>
> And if a distribution ships a few weeks before a release, that now
> means they can be shipping a version of Evolution which is a *year*
> old, instead of only six months old.

I agree with David.  My main frustration with Evo right now is that I'm
always a release behind because my distribution appears to be
chronically one Gnome release back (I understand this is due to my
distribution and not the responsibility of the developers), for whatever
reason.  That means I was stuck on 3.4 until May (which was bad as there
were numerous problems with 3.4), and will be using 3.6 for most of the
rest of the year.

If the distributors and the Evo release cycle don't line up nicely you
could be working with an Evolution that's more than 18 months old
(assuming a 6 month distro release cycle; some distros are longer than
that) before you get to the next version.


Not being familiar with Evo development I'm not sure how feasible it is,
but ideally part of the change in release cycle would mean divorce from
the Gnome version lockstep, and Evo being able to build against multiple
versions of Gnome.  If Evo were changed to be more of a stand-alone
utility (at least optionally), rather than being bundled with Gnome,
that would be (IMO) a good thing for users.