3.8/3.9 Divergence

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Apr 20 21:03:56 UTC 2005


"Doug Way" <dway at mailcan.com> wrote:
> 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?

For Debian, one year per release sounds fast, and 6 months unimaginable.

A lot of the choice depends on what you want a release to entail.  If
you want to have a set of packages to come along with the basic release,
then it would be good to use a longer time period.  These packages are
maintained by volunteers, and even a 6-month response time is often not
realistic.  Alternatively, if it is enough that the central image has
the major bugs out, then a shorter release period should be possible.

One other issue is not on your list: if you have a shorter release
period, there will be more users out there using "old" stable releases. 
The kind of user who uses a stable release, is by nature not going to
want to upgrade very frequently!  That means more versions to, well,
maybe not fully "maintain", but to care about.  

An important input to the decision, which is not clear yet for Squeak,
is how well users can use the development stream.  For Debian, most
desktop users follow /unstable and do just fine.  There are occasional
broken packages (probably less often than you'd think!), but you can
just back up to the previous version.  What does everyone think for
Squeak?  Can you track 3.9 and still get any work done, or do you fight
bugs all day?

If users can tolerate using the development stream, then long release
cycles of 1-3 years become tempting.  Such long cycles lower the burden
on the release teams,  lower the number of stable releases that are in
widespread use, and allow the release teams to insist on high standards.


-Lex



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