3.8/3.9 Divergence

Doug Way dway at mailcan.com
Mon Apr 18 22:54:52 UTC 2005


Hi Dean.  You are right for the most part.  For all practical purposes,
3.8 should be considered reverted to 3.8beta (or even alpha) with this
string refactoring that had to go in.  We had to make a decision on
whether it was worth adding to 3.8 at this late stage, and we decided
that it was worth it, even if it meant delaying the release by a month
or so.  (See my previous post in this thread for the reasoning as to why
it was worth it.)

The community basically doesn't have the manpower to put out releases
more frequently than every ~6 months or so.  But there are actually
advantages to not releasing too often, along with disadvantages.  One
positive is that random packages on SqueakMap are more likely to work
with each other if there are fewer stable releases for them to be based
on.  Are Debian stable releases much less frequent than that... like
every year or two?

On a side note, this likely means that 3.9 will probably not be released
until September/October or so.  There's really not much point in trying
to do it faster... having a longer release will give us more time to do
package partitioning and other tasks.  If someone *REALLY* wants a 3.9
released sooner, they can speak up, but by speaking up you have
volunteered yourself to manage the short 3.9-release process. :-)  (As
Michael did with 3.8.)

- Doug


-----------------------------
On Mon, 18 Apr 2005 17:40:43 -0400, Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM said:
> 
Hi Doug, 

Running concurrent development streams without a very strong management
structure is just asking for trouble.  We do this on some projects at my
day job, and it is always a struggle to pull changes forward from a
numerically lower version that was being worked on simultaneously.  IMO,
3.8gamma should have been frozen and declared "final" before people
launched into 3.9 alpha. 

When something is declared "gamma", to me, that should mean that "This
is essentially the final release except for fixing show stopping bugs
reported in the gamma build." or something similar.  Why is there no
"3.8 final" yet, and why is there a "3.9 alpha" and changes still being
made to both? 

I find the current state of affairs troubling, and have just stuck with
3.7 for anything I am working on until sanity returns to Squeak
development. 

It seems like 3.8 has been going on for quite a long time now (i.e. > 6
months).  Andreas is a very smart guy, but either 3.8 isn't really in
"gamma", or his refactoring should not be in the 3.8 "gamma" stream. 
There are too many open questions for this refactoring to go into a
"gamma" build, .  Mind you, I like his refactoring, but I think this is
more a question of development process.  It seems that this refactoring
is more of an improvement than a fix for show stoppers, so it shouldn't
go into a stream that is supposedly in "gamma", no? 

Am I misunderstanding the meaning of "gamma" for Squeak development
streams? 

                                        -Dean 



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