Re: Countdown to branch?

>
> Yes, I acknowledge there was a problem in the previous development
> cycle, but the solution to that is not to prevent us from working on new
> stuff by refusing to branch. The core developers have to take ownership
> of the STABLE, not just of HEAD (but that cannot be forced on us) and we
> have to agree a fixed and reasonably limited features list for 2.4 _now_
> (I have been asking for nearly two months now, but the discussion got
> completely out of hand).
>

Right. I find it hard to keep my ambitions to scale. Since I'm still
learning how to build Word Processors it's hard for me to judge how much
extra time is needed to bullet-proof features. I'll write out my list of
hoped-for-features in 2.4 in another email.

Maybe we can do a "it's two months to a release, no new features now!"
policy, I might not break it this time.

>> But again, I'm _not_ suggesting that HEAD be STABLE through to June.
>
> No, but from what was initially expected to be 4 weeks at most; it has
> been 5 weeks since 2.2.0 has been tagged, and you are now talking about
> another 7 weeks; that is another 3 months of nothing but bugfixing on
> the top of the the 6 months we have already done.
>
>> I also did not expect for there to be a few weeks of almost complete and
>> total dead wrt commits. I was hopeful that a Christmas-present branch
>> could be made that would still reflect the state in bugzilla. Wrong
>> about that one, obviously, but you can see I was not in favor of
>> lifetime lock-down.
>
> I believe that the slowdown is the direct consequence of the
> not-branching policy, which has created a serious morale problem; it
> might be technically sound, but it did not take the human factor into
> account. We have worked real hard for 6 months to get 2.2.0 out of the
> way. Nobody has the motivation to just fix bugs any longer, I think it
> is as simple as that.
>

Well my productivity has fallen off for various reasons over the last few
months. Much of the drop is due to effects unrelated to AbiWord but a bit
of it is. I am more interested in doing fun new features and reworking
core of the application a bit. Especially as I keep fixing "we can't
insert that thing at this document point bugs". I am itching to do some
2.4 work soon.

>> A point which while true, is only relevant given the premise that new
>> features take precedence over fixes for the mostly especially bad bugs
>> that are therein described.
>
> No, I am not making that assumption. I want to be able to both fix bugs
> in 2.2.x and work on features for 2.4. You are assuming the two are
> mutually exclusive.
>

Yes. I'm happy to do that too. I actually don't think the development
process for 2.2 was all that broken. It's mostly, like Mark as said, that
we're a small team working on a big project with no financial backing. I'm
very, very proud of what we've managed to acheive. We are a very unique
high-profile project (google us as first link of 11,300,000 hits for "word
processor" MSOffice is link number 7 and OOo is not on the main page.).
Maybe not quite as high-profile as we'd like, but that's OK we all need
something to strive for.

It's also good that we continually re-examine our processes to see if they
can be improved.

However if Marc is happy to be our prime back-porter and maintainer for
2.2 I think we're in good shape to launch into 2.4 whenever he's happy for
that to happen.

My own preference is that we branch after 2.2.3 but I'll leave that to the
2.2 maintainer.

MG, thanks very, very much for guiding us through 2.2. I really appreciate
your efforts and I do need cajoling and lecturing from time to time to
keep me on the rails. It's extemely hard to heard us cats in roughly the
right direction.

Cheers

Martin

> Tomas
>
Received on Thu Dec 30 01:51:21 2004