Release philosophy (was: Re: Miscellaneous Things)

[Lincoln Peters <sampln at sbcglobal dot net>]

On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 18:04, Stan Shebs wrote:
> The most important way to get visibility is to "release early and often".
> 7.5 doesn't have to be perfect, because only 5% of the audience will
> take note of the announce anyway; but 10% will notice the 7.5.1
> message, having been primed by the 7.5 release, and so forth. Since
> there hasn't been a release in a long time, most people will assume
> Xconq is a dead project and not even look to see what's up with it.

How about if, as soon as all of the serious bugs such as instant crashes
are fixed, we put out a release candidate (7.5rc1)?  Then we can wait
for anyone to report additional bugs, and we fix them, put out a new
release candidate (7.5rc2), etc.?  Then when a release candidate has
been out for a while (maybe a week or two) with no new bug reports, we
release 7.5.

Many open-source projects, such as OpenOffice.org, work this way, and it
seems to work very nicely for them.  And if nothing else, it becomes
clear to anyone who's paying attention that Xconq is *not* a dead
project.

Of course, I don't think that anyone wants to put out anything, even a
release candidate, while there are still major bugs that need to be
fixed.


Lincoln Peters <sampln@sbcglobal.net>