Release timing

[Christopher Hicks]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005, Gervase Markham wrote:
> People seem to be persistently misunderstanding me ;-)

Disagreement does not necessarily imply misunderstanding.

> 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.

Good.

> 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.

But its not silly and lucid arguments have been provided by myself and 
others as to why this is this case.  Maybe you're the one persistently 
misunderstanding?

> 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.

If it takes a long time to stabilize in one round developers will try 
harder the next time to stabilize things faster.

-- 
</chris>

"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)