trinity-devel@lists.pearsoncomputing.net

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Month: February 2014

Alternative release version numbering scheme proposal

From: Michele Calgaro <michele.calgaro@...>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 05:43:15 +0000 (GMT)
Dear all,
in etherpad 63 (http://trinity.etherpad.trinitydesktop.org/63) we had some discussions about switching to a fixed-time release cycle after R14.0.0 is out of the door. The end result of those discussions and the preliminary agreement of some developers is to use a 90-day release cycle (pending Tim's agreement too :) ).

The idea is to issue a maintenance release R14.0.x every 3 months, containing bug fixes and minor improvements, and issue a minor release R14.y.0 every year containing bigger improvements. This will require bugs to be backported from the trunk to the R14.0.x branch for up to 9 months (which could become not that easy after several changes are done in the trunk) and would provide major improvements to the users only once a year. On the other hand, it may prove a more stable solution.

An alternative scenario I have been tinkering for a while lately is one where every 3 months we ship whatever is in the trunk as the next release. In this case we do not need to backport any bug and users would be able to get major improvements up to 4 times each year. On the other hand we may introduce some degree of instability if a feature is not well tested before shipping it (but in any case that risk would exist also with the minor R14.y.0 releases of the first scenario), with the "fixing time" being the same (3 months in both scenarios).

Given the limited amount of development resources that we have, I have come to like the second scenario the most, and I would like to hear the opinion of other developers as well.
If we end up adopting the second scenario, I would also like to propose an alternative release version numbering schema: Ryy.x, where yy is the year number and x is a progressive release number within the yy year.
So for example this year we would have R14.0, R14.1, R14.2 (and R14.3 is R14.0 is released before March 31). Then next year we would have R15.0, R15.1, R15.2 and R15.3 and so on....
Coincidentally, this year is 2014, so the year number matches the R14 release number too :)

Also, a side-effect benefit would be that TDE would look more active to the general public with Ryy.x release numbers than R14.0.x release numbers, since the last would probably be thought of as "nothing major, just minor fixes".

Looking forward for your opinions.
Cheers
  Michele