[Squeakfoundation]re: release prioritization (was "ClassBuilder problem")

Hannes Hirzel hannes.hirzel.squeaklist at bluewin.ch
Fri Feb 28 07:37:15 UTC 2003


Hi Doug

Doug Way <dway at riskmetrics.com> wrote:
> 
> Okay, I'm very easily talked out of delaying the 3.4 release any 
> further :-) (and was having second thoughts after posting that last 
> message), so I agree with the prevailing opinion to leave this change 
> out and go ahead with the release.

Well of course you guides can do anything you want "releasing" things,
i.e. putting a label on a jar and call it a "release". Not having a
proper test culture in Squeak leads us to have this kind of funny discussions.
Measuring risk just with a feeling in the  guts? "I feel like
releaseing...
I'm scary of metaclasses ....people don't use them anyway...".

Releaseing something at the moment just means that  enough new
features have been added and the guides feel that people have not been 
complaining too much about new bugs. But there is no idea if a release
is better then an old one on the existing stuff or not.

Be assured the first thing I will do after downloading your release
is to include the fix of Andreas and already I will not work on 
your "release" anymore. And many of the list members will
just do the same. For me 3.4  will be a "release" which
is not proper Smalltalk (in the sense of the last 20 years) as it breaks

in a fundamental way without the fix by Andreas.
He really has done an *excellent job*. And the test case he
provided in just 30 minutes is wonderful! And the 
community is not able to verify his fix in 3 days ??

I wonder where this time pressure comes from? The 3.4 release
was planned for the end of 2002. No we are two month later.
So what? Are customers pressing somewhere? In fact that 
would be good. On the other side at least some customers
do not want a buggy 3.4.

MS  projects often get delayed much longer and with the .NET 
initiative (an  approach  with a VM as well!) they want to do  it 
"right",  even if that causes delays!

Again: where is the time pressure? There a good releases and
others. 


Regards
Hannes Hirzel




P.S. On the other side this discussion about "releases" is in some
sense a non issue as probably in the future we will have
different configurations which will be packed for various
target groups and automatically tested before releasing.

I could live with the idea of a buggy 3.4 if 3.5 for example
is planned for doing in two months time. Then 3.4 would
just be some kind of intermediary release. 


P.S. 2 The heading speaks of "priorization". Where are 
the plans for future releases? Non-existant!
Is there a check list what 3.4 should be? I didn't 
find it yet although as a member of the documentation
team I had surfed a lot over the existing Squeak 
web pages and I was active at the mailing list.

You guides , please do your homework!



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