Re: [Evolution] How would you feel about annual instead of semi-annual releases?

[tim wescottdesign com]

In my personal opinion I'd rather have stability, fewer bugs, and a 
supported product than I would like to have new bells and whistles.  I'm 
not sure what you put into a release vs. maintenance, but I like the 
current feature set just fine and would rather see it working so well 
that I never see another bug, rather than having some new look and feel 
every half-year.

I vote for fewer releases and the quality that comes from a relaxed 
schedule.

On 2013-07-28 10:16, Matthew Barnes wrote:
> The Evolution team is considering moving from our traditional 6 month
> release cycle to a 12 month release cycle starting next March, and is
> soliciting feedback from the user community.
>
> This is partly motivated by the team's desire for a longer development
> window in which to merge and test major changes, but moreover it's to
> provide better support to the user community.
>
> The team's manpower is still severely limited to where we can only
> realistically support one stable branch at a time and still manage to
> get any kind of significant development work done for the next major
> release.
>
> The problem is -- even for distros that also make semi-annual releases
> like Fedora and Ubuntu -- because of the lag between an upstream 
> release
> and a distro release, users are often upgrading to an Evolution 
> release
> that's either near the end of its upstream support window or is 
> already
> abandoned by developers.
>
> That's frustrating for everyone.  Developers want everyone using the
> latest (and in our opinion, best) release, and users don't like 
> waiting
> until their next distro upgrade to get their Evolution issues 
> resolved.
>
> So to compensate, the proposal is basically to make a major release
> annually instead of semi-annually, and to support each release for 12
> months instead of 6.  That gives users a better chance to sync up with
> developers for at least half the year, and hopefully get their issues
> resolved quicker.
>
> We intend to synchronize our annual major release with GNOME's spring
> release, and continue releasing stable updates and development snap-
> shots throughout the year at the same pace as we do currently: about
> once a month for each branch.  So we'll still hold to the "release
> early, release often" principle.
>
> You can peek at the developer thread on this starting from here:
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-hackers/2013-July/msg00004.html
>
> There seems to be a consensus in favor of this policy change on the
> developer side, although we're still working out the finer details of
> scheduling, versioning, etc.
>
> What do you guys think?  Would this be helpful?
>
> Matthew Barnes
>
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