[Zope-dev] Time-based releases vs Bugfixing

[Lennart Regebro]

On 6/15/06, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
> 2. Yeah, we all know that bugs should get fixed on all stable branches,
> but that becomes less and less likely the more stable branches there
> are. Time based releases seem to be making this problem much much worse.

Only because we have more stable releases, now than we had during
2002-2005. That in turn was because the development effort was
directed at Zope3 during this period. Before that, we has stable
releases around twice a year too:

Between 2.1 and 2.2 there was 225 days
Between 2.2 and 2.3 there was 196 days
Between 2.3 and 2.4 there was 178 days
Between 2.4 and 2.5 there was 186 days
Between 2.5 and 2.6 there was 266 days

All pretty much once every six months. What happened then, during 2.6
to 2.8 was that the development of Zope was done on Zope3, and Zope2
development suffered from this. So this is not a fault of time based
releases. The difference is this:

> 1. That's all well and good until you _need_ some feature like MVCC and
> are then forced to do an upgrade which breaks prettymuch every one of
> your products.

And the difference is that this didn't happen very often during 2.6 to
2.8, because there were no new features to _need_. That's not a good
thing. Zope2 development stood pretty much still for several years. We
are no picking up the slack, and yes, that means loads of rapid
changes. The alternative is stagnation and ultimately death.

-- 
Lennart Regebro, Nuxeo     http://www.nuxeo.com/
CPS Content Management     http://www.cps-project.org/