Re: Periodical releases

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Wed Jan 04 2012, Chong Yidong <cyd-AT-gnu.org> wrote:

> Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:
>
>> Is it not possible to have thorougness and high quality with more
>> frequent releases of smaller scope?  Maybe the problem (if there is
>> one) is that trunk is allowed to drift too far from a releasable
>> state.  I'm just saying.
>
> Features like bidi can't really be added piecemeal, and this goes back
> to Eli's point about bit-rotting feature trees.
>
> Frankly, I'm not convinced there's any problem.  Emacs 23.3 was released
> less than one year ago, and we are already well into the pretest for
> 24.1.  Doing considerably better would require resources we don't have.
> Note that all those projects that are being held up as models for their
> periodic release systems have people working on them full time!

For what it's worth, Boost has no full-time people, and it releases four
times yearly.  It wasn't always that way, though: for a while there we
had a period of painfully slow multi-year releases.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com