[Zope3-dev] Zope 3 release planning

[Garrett Smith]

Andreas Jung wrote:
> --On Donnerstag, 17. Februar 2005 11:35 Uhr -0600 Garrett Smith
> <garrett at mojave-corp.com> wrote:
> 
>> Jim Fulton wrote:
>>> Martijn Faassen wrote:
>>>> "Release early, release often" -- Zope 3 is missing out on a lot of
>>>> opportunities for open source contributions here. People are not
>>>> going to be attracted to the Zope 3 platform with only a single
>>>> release out and nothing else in sight.
>> 
>> I see the trunk as Zope's 'release early and often' strategy. I think
>> this is a smart, pracitcal way to get new features into people's
>> hands (early and often) without incurring the overhead of a formal
>> release. 
>> 
> 
> "Release early, release often" is in my opinion a bad strategy.

Eh, crud, now I'm hooked by one of my favorite philosphical topics :)
And I *just* read an article on email-distraction-management
techniques....sigh.

> Good software
> needs its time until its worth to be released. The Plone and
> Archetypes made the mistake to release stuff that was half-way baked 
> - both from the point of
> design and implementation. As a developer I prefer (meanwhile) to
> build my applications on top of stable releases instead of using
> brand new stuff that changes a from day to day or even from release
> to release. 

I don't think this is an either-or situation. There are early adopters
who want 'early and often' and there are more conserative adopters who
want 'tried and true'. In my experience, 'early and often' is needed to
get to 'tried and true'. As it stands, Zope offers both options: the
trunk and the releases.

Btw, Stephan's point about even/odd release numbers, indicating stable
vs experimental releases is very interesting. I've seen this in a few
projects, though I don't have any direct experience myself.

 -- Garrett