Things to remove for 2.0

Martin Pool mbp at sourcefrog.net
Fri Jul 24 22:58:24 BST 2009


2009/7/24 Matthew D. Fuller <fullermd at over-yonder.net>:
> So, 2.0 being a Big Milestone, it's a good place to switch defaults
> around.  It's also a good time to remove things in a kinda
> compat-breaking way.  We won't get another pre-3.0 chance.  I want to
> bring up a few.

Thanks for raising it.  I think both removing 'ci --local' and 'clone'
would be good.  Getting rid of clone is relatively easy; getting rid
of 'ci --local' and everything associated with it would take some more
work.  Possibly if we agree we'll go that way just removing that one
option would be a start, and would stop people creating new data in
that form, and then we can gradually work through the consequences.

Is this a good time in particular?  I don't think we have a very clear
sense of a cycle longer than monthly releases, and perhaps we should.
Within a release, we tend to say that disruptive changes should go in
near the start of the cycle.  But I don't think there's any
corresponding change at a higher level: possibly if we're close to 2.0
we should be making small conservative changes, not cutting features.
Possibly after we release 2.0, we should do some small and
conservative 2.0.1, .2, releases with only bug fixes.

On the whole I think delaying the integration or release of fixes or
improvements just tends to increase their cost, because the code goes
out of date or people have to wait longer to get them.  When we've
tried it either within particular releases or across releases it's
tended to come out poorly compared to just merging and releasing
things when they're ready, pretty much continuously.

In general we seem to be praised for getting improvements out soon
after the work is done.  I think there's some confusion about whether
people have to be upgrading to every release.  And churn with regard
to plugins, network interoperation or formats is seen as a big
negative.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>



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