Stability (was Re: TuxPaint woes)

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 30.07.2008, at 13:20, Greg Smith wrote:

> On when the code is stable and frozen enough to do final regression
> testing of activities:
>
> Michael,
>
> Can we track that as a milestone? Is that "code freeze (a.k.a.
> package-level change control)" which is targeted (pending confirmation
> e-mail) for Wed. August 6?
>
>
> On the question of future API re-architecture, it is under  
> consideration
> for 9.1.0 and being tracked here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0
> especially at
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#e-mail_from_Ben_S
>
> I will try to warn well in advance of any future API changes and I  
> will
> try to hold changes to a minimum (target none!) between 8.2.0 and  
> 9.1.0.
>  We need to hear confirmation from the engineers and we may need to
> revisit this after we put a stake in the ground on freezing 8.2.0  
> APIs.


What is frustrating is not even change itself - we all know that the  
platform is not stable yet so this is expected. The bad part is that  
changes happened after freezes, are usually unannounced, and remain  
undocumented even for major releases. For example, I filed

http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4695

about 9 months ago. Don't think anyone has worked on this. Also, it  
was silently moved to 8.2 without any notice in Trac. Bad.

And it's not only API, I remember that a library was removed to save  
space very late in a release cycle which broke our activity (was a few  
releases ago). So the set of libraries shipped should be frozen about  
the same time the API is frozen (or maybe that is implied, since  
removing libraries could be seen as fundamental API change).

- Bert -