Release timing

[Luis Villa]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 09:09:09 -0500 (EST), Christopher Hicks
<chicks at chicks.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Jan 2005, Stuart Donaldson wrote:
> 
> > You don't find yourself running up against a fixed release date, causing
> > artificial pressure.  (If this were a company with all paid developers,
> > rather than the large number of volunteers, the fixed release dates
> > could work.  But figure out why you're doing it.)
> 
> Given the history of the project as I've seen it I think having some
> artificial pressure might be beneficial.

We've also found (in GNOME) that while the artificial pressure is not
always ideal for volunteers, it does have the plus of focusing people
on our version of reviews regularly, and it means new contributors get
their patches out to the 'real world' very quickly. If I'd contributed
something at the beginning of the 2.18 cycle, and then seen it take 2+
years for that contribution to get out to the world, that would be
discouraging. And in a corporate world, it is quite irritating- if I
convince my boss to let me contribute to bugzilla because it'll help
reduce maintenance costs, and then it is years before my contribution
actually makes it into a release and helps the company, then I'm going
to have problems justifying that in the future. Regular, fast releases
on a pre-determined schedule mean contributors see results quickly,
which is a big plus.

Luis

Luis