Brave new (1.0) world.

[Will Coleda]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 1:15 PM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 12:46:30PM -0500, Will Coleda wrote:
>> It was also my understanding that the 1.5 release was similarly
>> time-based. However, both 1.0 and 1.5 have a lot of features/goals,
>> and since we can't fix the feature list AND the release date, which is
>> the sticking point? (I'm willing to treat 1.0 differently, but 1.5 and
>> onward should all follow the same guidelines.)
>
> It's always been my understanding that we do time-based releases, and
> that continues with the milestone releases and their numbering.  Thus
> the July 2009 release will be 1.5, and if anything has to slip it
> will be the feature set and not the number or release date.

If we're calling 1.0/1.5/2.0 -milestone- releases, then they should
actually be milestones. [1]

If 1.5 is released in July 2009 regardless of what's in the release,
then calling it a milestone release (and giving it a special version
number to note the fact) is misleading. If that's the intent, then I
would recommend dropping the version numbers and just calling it
"200907".

I would rather see the feature set required for milestone releases be
fixed (or at least fairly firm), have monthly releases of the 1.0
milestone branch occur until 1.5 is ready to ship, and then update the
release date to "whenever it happens.".

> At PDS when coming up with the feature set for each release,
> the goal was to identify the latest date/release at which we
> expected that feature to be available, so that there hopefully
> wouldn't be much slippage.  How effective we are at such estimates
> remains to be determined...

Less than 100%, at least.

> Pm
>

[1] equivalent to the pre-PDS world where going from 0.7.1 to 0.8.0
(e.g.) indicated we'd actually changed something major, but if we had
gone to 0.7.2 instead, it would have indicated only minor updates. the
release still occurs monthly, but features drove whether or not it
made sense to consider it a milestone release or not.

-- 
Will "Coke" Coleda