So in my job at OpenGeo I've been putting less pressure on our
developers to drive the release process, in the hopes that the community
can have both more control and more responsibility. Which I believe is
the right direction - the community has the potential to grow much more
if it's not just OpenGeo driving the release process.
We will still make resources available to help when the community
decides to release, but it may not be immediate as it was when we'd
decide the release date.
But I want to say something without my OpenGeo hat on at all. As just a
community member who's been around for awhile:
Release! As soon as possible. There is always going to be something
that is not quite perfect. It's software. We've never had a
perfect GeoServer release, and we never will.
But if there's too much time in RC land we really start to increase the
risk. The risk that more bugs will be introduced, as developers take
the RC status less seriously. And the risk that the project will be
taken less seriously, because it goes too long without a release. Of
course there's risk releasing too early, and having people be burned on
things that they expect to work, and not taking the project seriously
because of that. So it's always a fine line.
In my humble opinion the risks of not releasing are right now
outweighing those of not. If I'd been driving the process we'd be at
2.0 now. And it wouldn't be nearly as good as what will be 2.0. But
it'd be out, and probably at 2.0.1 because of some emergency bug fixes.
But we'd have a lot more people using the code now.
I personally think the full week of QA _before_ a release is overkill.
The point of putting out an RC is to get QA. We've gotten a bunch of QA
on RC 1. Put out RC2 as soon as possible, and unless there are true
major blockers (meaning _major_ regressions) turn it in to 2.0.0. And then just be on hand to fix any major thing that went undiscovered and do a 2.0.1 as soon as possible. It won't be perfect, but it will be _far_ better overall than anything else we've put out.
I'm not sure how 'the community' makes this decision. It requires someone to say 'we're not going to wait for X', which is harder to do as a community. Other projects designate a release manager to make that call. But please let's make this call. It's been almost 7 weeks since any GeoServer release, which is longer than we've gone for awhile. And it's been over 11 months since the last .0 release. I really do fear for GeoServer if we keep waiting for just 1 more thing. Those things can come in later releases.
thanks,
Chris
Jody Garnett wrote:
Andrea nobody got back to us on 2.0-RC2. It appears from the wiki page put together that we have met our goals and this hsould be a 2.0 release?
I propose a target date of the 12th; anything later and we are in danger of shipping after the conference. This allows time to call a code freeze on monday and have a week of QA. We should try and make a decision and invite testers to take part if we are going to do this one.
Jody
On 26/09/2009, at 3:50 AM, Andrea Aime wrote:
Hi all,
I'm writing you to propose foster some discussion on the next release
dates given the roadmap discussions seems to be a little stalled
(I guess we'll have to turn it into a GSIP and aks for a vote).
Anyways, back on the release dates.
GeoServer 1.7.6 was released almost 2 months ago, development on that
branch seems to have hit a standstill, and we have a decent number
of fixes (34):
http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&fixfor=15542&pid=10311&resolution=1&resolution=2&resolution=3&resolution=4&resolution=5&resolution=6&sorter/field=priority&sorter/order=DESC
I was wondering if we could try out the testing freeze with it, since
development has stopped anyways already? What about starting the
freeze on Monday, take it for a run during the week, and actually
build the release next Friday and announce on Monday?
Do we have interest and resources to do so? Mark?
I can help out a bit by running the CITE tests I think.
As for GeoServer 2.0-RC2, the same timeline might be good
as well if we have enough people interested, or we can
delay a bit more and do it the end of the week after.
If we do so it basically means that we're lucky and we
re-release RC2 as 2.0 final during FOSS4G, or... it might
end up being a bit too late.
Thoughts?
Cheers
Andrea
--
Andrea Aime
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
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