[Zope-dev] Re: Time-based releases a good idea?

[Martijn Faassen]

Chris Withers wrote:
> Lennart Regebro wrote:
>>
>> So this is not a problem with deprecation period, time based releases
>> or anything else, then.
> 
> No, but the slew of deprecation warnings, proliferation of branches that 
> need to be supported (regardless of whether they're "officially" 
> production or not) and sheer amount of change you now HAVE (rather than 
> 'can choose') to deal with seems a sign, at least to me, that time-based 
> releases were a nice experiment, but maybe it's time to think again?

I disagree completely. I think time based releases were a factor in 
rescuing at least Zope 2 from complete stagnation. I also think that 
time based releases have helped getting a lot more Zope 3 to everybody 
much faster than before. They have encouraged people to actually 
contribute to the core, as they know the fix or feature will be in there 
in a few months, at a predictable time, not years in the indefinitey 
future as it was before. Overall I think time based releases have been 
overwhelmingly *successful*.

And yes, porting applications to new releases takes time and is 
frequently painful. If the alternative is stagnation or having to write 
code against old APIs that I know have better alternatives somewhere in 
subversion but don't know when they'll ever get released, I'll gladly 
take that pain.

That said, of course things have to be done carefully. Stick with the 
release policy we all should be following anyway: don't deprecate 
anything in a bugfix release. Carefully consider backwards 
compatibility. Back out of changes that are too damaging.

I'm curious to hear what alternative you'd prefer. I didn't like the old 
release "policy" much: from 2.6 to 2.7 took over a year and a half. The 
alpha for 2.7 was released almost a *year* before 2.7 was finally 
released. It then took a year for 2.8 to be released. Nobody knew what 
was going to happen when, and Zope 2 development was pretty stagnant for 
huge spans of time (not discounting the wonderful work that *was* done 
in that period). People were building piles of framework code on top of 
Zope that should've gone into the core where we could all share it, but 
people avoided the core.

Now, Zope 2 is alive again.

Regards,

Martijn