Four! was Re: Two major releases per year instead of three

[Matt Mackall]

On Tue, 2011-07-26 at 12:32 +0200, Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
> http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/TimeBasedReleasePlan
> 
> I'm voting for doing two major releases per year instead of three.

I've actually been thinking for a while that we should go to four.

> For example, we're still trying to figure out on TortoiseHg how to fix
> the collateral damage caused by the last-minute command server changes
> done in 1.9 (actually, it feels like no one is looking at things like
> [1] right now).

Lowering the release frequency will actually probably make that worse,
not better.

> And Mercurial users are increasingly skipping major releases, for
> various reasons.

But importantly, they don't skip them as a herd. There are plenty of
users still on 1.0 - that's fine so long as significant numbers of
people use 1.9. People can stick with 1.0 as long as it suits them.

I chose 3 releases per year rather than 2 initially because 6 months was
clearly too long a wait for both developers and users alike. And it's
beginning to seem like 4 months is too long too.

Shorter cycles mean:

- developers can get their work in the hands of users and get feedback
more quickly -> developers do more work!
- users can get new features more rapidly -> happier users!
- fewer API changes between releases make it easier for third parties to
synchronize

The obvious response is "if shorter is better, why not make releases
every month?" And the answer is: we could easily do that, and it would
actually be less work for me. I'd maintain a single branch and just cut
releases from it monthly. But I don't think third-party projects would
be pleased with potentially having to cut their own monthly releases.

So I've actually been thinking of switching to 3 month cycles after 2.0.
That would give us major releases on Nov 1, Feb 1, May 1, and Aug 1.
This would also align better with the 6-month release cycles of Ubuntu
and Fedora.

We could probably also plan on having sprints twice a year rather than
every 8 months.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.