[Techteam] [sugar] Making updating easier and Planning for Support

[Martin Langhoff]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 11:18 AM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> As Kim stated earlier, in the end this becomes a cost of effort issue.
> >From a developer point of view the more releases the better.  From a
> support perspective maintaining several long releases can quickly suck
> the energy from a project.

Definitely - what my experience (as dev and release mgr for a few
versions of moodle) tells me is that we want to copy how large distros
operate, but in a smaller fashion:

 - Treat our focused dev projects (ie Sugar) as an "upstream" to the
distro. This means that the Sugar team will prob want to make frequent
releases, some of them reasonably lined up with the distro's
schedules. What you are doing w the activities hosting is great in
this regard.

 - Run milestone "integration" releases, without a strong promise of
support for end users. If we stop doing this, parts might drift, and
QA won't have anything to work on. Debian does not do this in an
organised fashion (their testing branch is an informal version of
this) and that is part of the reason their release cycles are glacial.
Ubuntu has 6-monthly releases that are short-term supported - and they
have an much easier time in hitting their schedule and delivering a
predictable outcome. We don't want to promise the support Ubuntu
promises - but cutting integration releases is IMHO quite important.

cheers,



m
-- 
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