Re: 2.14 release, or GOP now (part 2)

[Valentin Villenave]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 2) release 2.14 ASAP with no critical flaws, but with some kind of
> code freeze.
>  Many software projects implement a "freeze" before a release --
>  when the project is "frozen", this means that no changes are
>  allowed, unless they have a very good reason why they absolutely
>  must be changed before the next release.  With git, there's no
>  technical reason why we might want to freeze anything (I could
>  just branch a stable/2.14, and just cherry-pick individual commits
>  to apply to this branch).  However, there are social reasons for a
>  freeze.  We (implicitly) have a freeze on policy decisions, to
>  avoid spending time on those instead of release-critical work.
>  We could add a freeze on patches and code, to avoid spending
>  time on those instead of release-critical work.

I think branching is the right thing to do here. This what the Fedora
guys have been doing for their last couple of releases: as soon as
they reach alpha stage, they branch off the new version and continue
development on master, with the "branched" branch only getting
backports of bugfixes.

Yes, I hear you saying that we probably don't have the resources for
such things. I'd have agreed with you three years ago, but I'm not so
sure today.

If anything, we probably should have branched 2.14 off much earlier
(please note however that as far as I can see, of all the critical
bugs we have now, none has been introduced in the past two or three
months).

>  I do not like this idea either.  This is a volunteer project;
>  telling contributors that we will (for example) not discuss any
>  changes to tabulature code is not going to encourage those
>  volunteers to stick around.

Wow, I didn't even knew "tabulature" was a proper word :)

> 3) continue development as we do now.
>  We have a "freeze" on policy decisions, but not code.  Expected
>  release is Feb - March 2011.  I am personally fed up with
>  critical bugs, so I would spend a bit more time helping new
>  contributors, but I would not raise any policy questions.  We
>  make no particular attempt to focus development on
>  release-critical issues.

Are you still planning to work on 1336?

>  I am aware that there is some dissatisfaction with the current
>  state of affairs.  I am neutral on this point.

I'd rephrase that as "I like to think of me as being neutral on this point" ;-)

> What do you think?  This is not a vote, but I would like to hear
> from people.  I am hoping that we can find a reasonable amount of
> consensus.

As far as I'm concerned, option #2, certainly. I keep thinking (me
being fluffy and all) that a Xmas-New Year release would be nice, a
bit like Han-Wen did with 2.12 (only more deliberately planned ahead).

Cheers,
Valentin.

(PS. Perhaps now would be as good a time as any to publicly state that
I'm leaving the project by the end of the year, partly due to
aforementioned dissatisfactions. So whatever I might have to say until
then can, and likely will, be safely disregarded.)