Proposed IcedTea 6 release

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Andrew,

On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 12:18 +0100, Andrew Haley wrote:
> I've worked on projects with regular timed releases and with
> feature-based releases, and the feature-based releases work better.
> They're much more aligned with what users want: no-one wants Release
> 1.9, they want Feature X.

That is opposite to my experiences. Users and developers seem to prefer
a release early, release often approach. It isn't about features, it is
about a steadily improving product. It takes away fear of developers
that their feature won't make it, since they know there will be just
another release 6 weeks from now, when they can polish it up and make
ready. It means no arbitrary delays for stuff being released because it
"isn't a big enough feature to release now". Users get the bug fixes at
regular intervals. And it makes distros happy because they don't have to
carry so many backports for bugs that have been fixed upstream already
but are still in a holding pattern to be released on an unclear
schedule.

> You are proposing a change that has costs associated with it.  For
> that to work, we would have to have buy-in across the IcedTea
> community and a commitment to do the work.  Without that, releases
> would not be tested.  And if there is one thing that we must not do,
> it is to make untested releases.

We should have buy-in indeed. I think we have. You seem to be the only
person against more regular releases. But maybe the other people are
just too timid to tell me what a crazy idea it is :)

But I am happy to defer to the actual release master. If they feel doing
regular releases is too much work, then obviously they won't happen.

What we have been doing, and should do more, is making IcedTea always
releasable. We have setup multiple autobuilders and testers to make sure
the build is never broken and no unknown regressions slip in.

Cheers,

Mark