Re: We Want Quality

On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Sascha Schumann wrote: > The recent trouble has shown that our release process is far > from being perfect. In order to achieve better quality > releases, I urge the PHP community to adopt a couple of > simple rules: > > Do not release anything untested. Nice concept, except we do not have the resources to do that. We tried to do that by letting people test the code 3 days in advance, which did not discover the Windows CGI problem. > This will delay releases until all obvious bugs are found. > That is good. This will also catch bugs which were introduced > through other bug fixes. That leads to the second postulate: > > Do not add features during release time. No features were added during release time, AFAIK. If you refer to the DISCARD_PATH issue that was the source of the Windows CGI bug, it was a bug fix, not a new feature. > The simplest feature can break something. Changes are bad. > Avoid them. > > Do not act hasty. > > Release candidates can get thrown out hourly, if necessary. > The final release candidate should be available to the public > for at least five days. This is completely unfeasible, and can definitely not live peacefully with your previous suggestion. We can't halt development for 5 days, it'd simply not work. Even holding the code in a semi-frozen state for 3 days between the RC announcement and the Release announcement is almost mission-impossible; Keeping a 100% frozen codebase for 5 days between the last working RC and the Release is both not doable, and not something I would like to get to anyway. We should still behave like an OpenSource project and not like a bureaucratic company. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/