Re: We Want Quality

On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Zeev Suraski wrote: > Well, I do consider this not only a big problem, but something that's > simply not doable. Moreover, I don't even consider this a positive thing. > Releasing a patch level a day after the release is, in my opinion, much > better than freezing development at different levels for a couple of > weeks. Considering there were 2 such fuckups (a major one with gpc back > then, and a minor one with the Windows CGI now) on more than 20 releases, > I think our process is more than reasonable as a baseline. I'd once again disagree. I don't know if you've ever gone through a commercial alpha/beta program, but I have - in fact, I'm going through one right now for a big company. The rule is that after a certain date, no features get added and no new stuff gets committed, except for fixing major crash bugs and such, and even then, some of them are put off until the next incremental release. Granted, our codebase is much smaller, so we like to think that we know it pretty well and by implementing a minor feature or a bug fix, we will not destabilize the tree. However, as you pointed out, it did happen a few times already, and it will happen again. I see nothing wrong with being a little more professional and disciplined as far as our release process is concerned. > Considering nobody cared about the 4.0.0 release schedule, I find it > surprising you say we can adhere to a schedule. We pretty much proved > that we can't. Perhaps, schedule was a bad choice of a word - I meant that it wouldn't be too hard to close down CVS for 5 days or so and make sure that we do not screw up the RC accidentally. -Andrei * Ethernet n.: something used to catch the etherbunny. *