[qbzr] qbzr 0.19b1 late - sorry [RFC] Release cadence balance wrong?

[Alexander Belchenko]

Gary van der Merwe пишет:
> I was meant to have done the 0.19b1 release yesterday, but I didn't
> because I was deving cool bug fixes and features. I'm sorry it's late.
> I'm sure I will get it out before the end of this weekend.
> 
> I've been thinking about it today; and I feel that we don't have the
> correct balance between time doing development and time doing release
> related tasks.
> 
> I guess I'm feeling this way because:
> 
> * I spent alot of time updating the ppas for bzr 2.1 and all plugins in
> the ppa. This took about 2 weeks of my "can spend on bzr time available
> time". Maybe this was misspent time. But ppas are the easiest way to get
> the software out to ubuntu users.
> 
> * bzr is synchronizing it's releases with ubuntu. 2.0 was late, and so
> 2.1 had to play catch up, and so felt shortened.
> 
> * Maintaining a stable branch has increased our release costs.

I feel maintaining at least one stable branch is worth its efforts.
Maybe we should drop support for 0.14.6 soon. But definitely 0.18.x is 
the good way for doing things.

For me doing release is about 1-2 hours work, including updating news, 
packaging tarball and building installer, register release on LP, upload 
files to LP, and then write and send a bunch of announce mails.

So if you need my help for doing the release, you always can just ask. I 
can't help with PPA, sorry.

> * A serious bug in the treewidget that took a long time isolate, and
> fix, put off other more interesting work.
> 
> Now those things are out of the way, I've just gotten into the zone with
> some interesting work, but I have to stop that, and do a release.

Most of the time I'm doing the releases. I'm OK to continue doing so. I 
wasn't aware that it creates so much troubles for you.

> Maybe all of these contributing factors are abnormal, and there isn't
> really a problem. I don't know.
> 
> So, some ideas on how we can fix this:
> 
> * Look at ways that we can reduce our release cost. Any ideas ?

I don't understand "release cost". Is there anything I can automatize?
Today building release files is just

make release RELEASE=0.19b1

it's the easiest part IMO.

If we need the script to update versions info in 3 places (__init__.py, 
setup.py, qbzr.iss) -- I think it's possible to do.

What else can be done? I don't know how to reduce because I'd like to 
understand what need to be reduced.

> * May be release less frequently during the beta phases, but with the
> same frequency during the rc and final phases. I would like for qbzr
> release to stay insync with bzr releases, so this would need buy in from
> bzr.

We can switch to 2-months release cycle in QBzr. Why not?