[Squeakfoundation]re: release process (was "Shrinking alpha image")

[danielv at netvision.net.il]

[Faster turn around needed, at least for small things]
Yup, I agree. 

Doug Way <dway at riskmetrics.com> wrote:
> 
> On Saturday, March 22, 2003, at 03:05 AM, Craig Latta wrote:
> 
> >> A few questions it should answer -
> >> * How do we know what the community will come up with beforehand?
> >
> > 	We don't need to read minds. We can just decide that features get
> > *scheduled* before they get included. E.g., if you come up with some
> > whizzy new feature during the 3.6 cycle, you can suggest it for a 
> > future
> > feature schedule (3.7 or later).
> >
> > 	Of course there will be some deviation from the ideal. For example,
> > critical fixes often get special dispensation (inclusion into the
> > current schedule instead of waiting for a future schedule). In general,
> > though, I think it's good to encourage planning the next several
> > releases. In particular, at any given time there are usually large
> > features (e.g., changing the format of compiled methods) that one can
> > imagine happening in the next major release as opposed to the next 
> > minor
> > release.
> 
> This sounds generally good.
> 
> The only tweak I would make is that the number of items which get 
> "special dispensation" (inclusion into the current schedule) could be 
> fairly large, as long as they are small fixes/enhancements without 
> major ramifications.  This would include both critical and minor fixes 
> harvested from the sqfixes page, and also minor enhancements.  (During 
> the alpha stage of course.)  We want to have a reasonably quick 
> turnaround on these smaller items; postponing them to the next release 
> as a general rule would be too long.
> 
> As an example, I can imagine that several dozen bugfixes may go into 
> 3.6 without being in the plan.  A bugfix with major ramifications 
> (which is arguably more than just a "bugfix") should be part of a 
> scheduled plan, though.
> 
> Perhaps one way to address this is to just have "miscellaneous bug 
> fixing" or similar as part of each plan/schedule.  Eh, that's sort of 
> cheesy. ;-)  Although there may be times when we want to include in our 
> plan that we want to hold off on minor fixes/enhancements for a couple 
> of weeks before some massive change is made, for example.
> 
> Another thing that we can do is, when reviewing items on sqfixes, if a 
> submission seems like too large/widespread a change for inclusion in 
> the current schedule, we can add a comment/opinion stating that it 
> needs to be discussed further on this list and should be part of a plan 
> for a future release.
> 
> - Doug Way
> 
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