Release timing

[Gervase Markham]

Luis Villa wrote:
> Just for the record, at GNOME we've found good freeze dates are the
> most important part of actually getting the release out on time. You
> can say 'we'll release every six months', but if you don't freeze
> appropriately, you'll never release on time.

Absolutely. But, as you say, there's not much value put (in the GNOME 
project) on having freezes at the same time every calendar year. You do 
whatever's good for the people you have at the time.

People seem to be persistently misunderstanding me ;-) I'm not arguing 
for no freeze dates, or vague freeze dates. I'm not arguing that we 
shouldn't have a schedule, or we should release "when we feel like it". 
I'm not saying we shouldn't have a roadmap, or the next release 
shouldn't have a target release date.

I'm just saying there's no value in saying e.g. "our freeze is going to 
be in October every year". If you, for whatever reason, took a long time 
to make the previous release and it's now late August, freezing in 
October "because that's what we said we would do 9 months ago" seems silly.

We should aim to make releases every X months (where people seem to 
think X is 6). But if a release takes 8 months because people are busy, 
or it takes a long time to stabilise, or for whatever reason, the next 
release should be six months beyond that one, not four.

Gerv