Proposal to delay release of Precise Pangolin

[Allison Randal]

On 12/13/2011 12:11 AM, James Freer wrote:
> After reading the following posts i wanted to raise the release issue.
> It seems that staff are under  a lot of pressure to deliver the 6
> month releases as well as LTS. I've been using Ubuntu for about  5 yrs
> and it seems that quality varies between releases likely due to the
> pressure staff are under.
> 
> Would it not be better for all to produce an annual version that's
> allowed time for testing and bug fixing. LTS is ok but second year and
> one is starting to find quite a few apps that have been updated and a
> six month release simply doesn't give adequate time for staff. If
> you're wondering what i do... i'm an april updater

A release cycle that's twice as long doesn't really give you more time
to test changes, it just gives you twice as many changes to test. And it
makes some kinds of changes much more difficult, because they need to be
staged over multiple releases for a smooth transition.

Here's a good post (short):
http://jroller.com/thuss/entry/there_are_pros_and_cons

But if you have time, I recommend reading Martin Michlmayr's full
Doctoral dissertation.
http://www.cyrius.com/publications/michlmayr-phd.html

>From the conclusion:
==========
In contrast to traditional software development which is feature-driven,
the goal of time based release management is to produce high quality
releases according to a specific release interval. This dissertation has
shown that feature based release management in FOSS projects is often
associated with lack of planning, which leads to problems, such as
delays and low levels of quality.
[...]
Time based releases are associated with two factors that act as
important coordination mechanisms:

1. Regularity: the production of releases according to a specific
interval allows projects to create regular reference points which show
contributors what kind of changes other members of the project have
made. Regularity also contributes to familiarity with the release
process, and it leads to more disciplined processes.

2. Schedules: by using time rather than features as the orientation for
a release, planning becomes possible in voluntary projects. Time based
projects can create schedules which describes important deadlines and
which contains dependency information between different work items and
actors.

Together, these mechanism reduce the degree of active coordination
required in a project. Developers can work on self-assigned work items
independently and with the help of the schedule integrate them into the
project in time for the release. As such, the time based release
strategy is a means of dealing with the complexity found in
geographically distributed volunteer projects with hundreds of contributors.
==========

Allison