* Lori Bowen Ayre (lori.ayre@galecia.com) wrote:
I want to pull out these paragraphs from David Lang's email because I think it is an important point about the benefits of sticking to time-based releases. I think if we had stuck to this principle, we wouldn't be having the troubles we are having (as a community) with some of our biggest contributors needing to support versions of Koha that are different from the latest official version.
Wow. The single biggest contributor to Koha over time, in terms of a simple lines of code metric, Biblibre, suggested we try a time based release for 3.4. The community agreed. Biblibre have, and I have faith always will, contribute all their code upstream. In fact they spent a serious amount of time after the hackfest working with others to get their patches in a state that they could go through QA. I am not sure who these other big contributors that you speak of are? Galen, Joe Atzberger, Chris Nighswonger, Owen Leonard, MJ, me?. I actually find it quite reprehensible to suggest that the forks are the fault of previous release managers. Everyone with eyes and ears knows the real reason. Lets just try a time based release and see how it works for us, like the community decided. Chris
Several years of time based releases after many years of 'let the dates slip, the release will be better' seems to show pretty decisivly that frequent releases with what's ready at that time work better in practice than delaying a release until the features that were tagged for it are all ready.
if you delay a release until the feature is ready, there is a lot of preasure to declare it ready when it really isn't, because people really want all the other features that are in a new release.
because the releases aren't predictable, developers really want thir stuff to go into _this_ release because they don't know how long they will have to wait for the next one. If you have frequent releases, the knowledge of when the next release will happen (and therefor when the code will be upstream)
Well said, David. And here here! And ++ Lori Ayre
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