Regular release schedule?

Hi all,

in light of the not-quite-so-steady release intervals we have at the moment, I though it might make sense to get on a bi-weekly or monthly release schedule. It doesn’t really matter how many issues we fix or how many features we add for a given release, but I think it would be good for app developers to get steady upgrades with the latest fixes and improvements. Furthermore, it would show potential developers that there is constant progress and maybe make it more attractive to participate therefore. Last but not least, it would also be a motivation to just get more things done and have that regular feeling of having achieved something instead of building up to goals that might be out of reach.

Thoughts? Ideas? Opinions?

yes, i would vote for monthly. if there is a fix that you want in your app then you can always build head, and otherwise it’s good for app devs to update the lib once a month.

it may also make sense to provide an “0.7.latest” url, so that an app can choose to receive all non-breaking releases. otherwise an app dev can just update their app once a month.

Apart from the instructions in the API docs guide, we should probably add instructions for both that, as well as how to get started with testing and development, as a guide to this forums category (and eventually remove all guides from the docs anyway).

Could some more people (especially @nilclass) please give their thoughts? I think this is an important topic, and it would be great to know when e.g. the periodic sync will be fixed in stable.

It’s just so much easier to make a release no matter what than building up to something, because we think it’s something special. That’s what patch versions are for, and if we break APIs or add big features, we can decide to do minor and major releases every single time. No need to know before release day. :wink:

It would also enforce a steady changelog, making it much easier to follow development and learn more about the core code.

So, one vote is currently out for monthly, which I find reasonable as well…

Ok, let’s do monthly. I’ll prepare a patch version including the periodic sync fixes some time this week.

Cool! Any preferences for a date or day? Maybe it’s easier to pick a certain day of the week than a fixed day of the month. This Saturday would be the second Saturday of the month for example.

For what it’s worth, I agree on regular releases instead of building up towards something.

But having a certain day of the week is a bit strange – it works for meetups but seems unfitting for releases. Wouldn’t something like first (or last) day of the month make more sense for releasing? And then it would just be the 2013-06 release etc.

My reason behind that is, that it may be easier for a group of volunteers to commit to a certain weekday. Just an idea, though. Not sure if that’s actually the case.

So, what about a new release and regular releases from then on?

So, new release. What do we want in there?
I would say:

anything else?

let’s release on the first day of each month from now on

Sounds good to me! @nilclass?

Sounds good. So 0.7.4 coming up next monday!

I don’t see a release from Monday.

By the way, GitHub just turned tags into releases as release objects and with features like changelogs: https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software

I moved a post to a new topic: remoteStorage.js 0.8 release