Re: Release dates

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-05-01 at 15:02, Owen Taylor wrote:
> Next, time I really need to try *not* spending ~30% of my time
> maintaining the stable branch while working on the development
> branch. And see how people like that.

I was not implying that that would have been a good idea either.

> > For a long time, we just waited for GTK to be "done".  So I think it's
> > kind of funny that, after spending all this time to let the GTK
> > maintainers make GTK "Perfect", we are now arguing that the desktop can
> > go out unpolished and incomplete.
> > 
> > Although, I am not completely disagreeing with you on the fact that we
> > should just be releasing the damn thing.  ;-)  I am just pointing this
> > out in the hope that we won't be making the same mistake again.
> 
> I hope that mistake you are referring to is not that we spent a lot of
> time making sure that the new GTK+ API's actually worked well and will
> work well going forward.

Of course not.  :-)

The work on the GTK+ API has been great and now we have a much better
platform to work on, but at the same time, GTK+ could have tried to
solve fewer problems at the same time, and then we would have had a
shorter development cycle and people would have not been waiting for the
2.0 release of GTK+ for such a long time.

> Maybe you are saying that the mistake was letting the desktop *become*
> unpolished and incomplete just because GTK+ was undergoing major
> work. I'd agree with that.

That's also part of the problem.  It was not my intention at all to put
all the blame on the GTK+ developers.  But sure having a shorter GTK+
release cycle would have helped that as well.

The thing is, for a while the GTK+ world and the GNOME world have been
kind of separate universes.  GTK+ had its own schedule and its
particular set of priorities, and they were not necessarily the same as
GNOME's.  I think that really hurt the project; the long release cycle
of GTK+ might have been good for GTK+, but it was no good at all for
GNOME.

All I am asking for is that, in the future, we make sure that the two
camps are on the same track.  Which is what is already mostly happening
to the best of my knowledge -- but I pointed this out as Havoc's message
seemed to blame the featuritis and delay attitude on the GNOME part,
which I think is a bit unfair.

> Anyways, I don't want to start pointing fingers. And keep the turn-around
> times short is an important goal for 2.x releases of GTK+. 

Yeah, I am really glad that that's what is going to happen.
 
> I'm just all-in-all quite happy with how the GTK+-2.0 release cycle
> went and the end product, and am a little upset at the implication
> of irresponsibility in your mail.

I apologize if my message came out as an accuse of irresponsibility. 
That's really not what I meant to do.

-- 
Ettore