[Zope3-dev] Roadmap for Zope 3.4

[Jim Fulton]

On Sep 12, 2006, at 5:25 AM, Martijn Faassen wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> Thanks for doing this work, Christian. I'm in favor of going for  
> Zope 3.4 on a timely basis.
>
> Concerning the delay of Zope 3.3, I think we should consider  
> whether we're not too perfectionistic.
>
> On the one hand core developers seem to be happy to use the trunk  
> for development projects, and on the other hand we demand a lot of  
> work doing bugfixes in a release, up to the point where we delay  
> the release itself. That's a bit paradoxical - evidently the bugs  
> aren't harmful enough to harm these developers much most of the  
> time, but at the same time we consider them extremely harmful if  
> they should appear in a release.
>
> What about a policy where we fix bugs until the release date, and  
> then on the release date, we actually release? Any bugs that are  
> still in it are going to go with it.
>
> Anyway, if the Gnome project can do time-based releases *on the  
> date* we should be able to do it too.

Maybe they have more volunteers.  I don't think our problem has been  
perfectionism.  I think our problem has been a lack of will to fix  
things in a timely manner.

One problem we have is getting things to be tested.  It hardly  
motivates people to test for and report bugs if their reports don't  
affect he release.

I think we have a serious problem that needs to be addressed.  I  
don't think the right way to address it is to release despite known  
serious bugs.  Note that some judgement goes into considering whether  
a bug is serious enough to block a release.  We don't block a release  
for just any bug.

I can think of a number of ways to approach this problem:

1. Do less frequent releases.

2. Feature freeze the trunk until the previous release has made it to  
release candidate status

3. Release less.  I think it's time to start thinking of some sort of  
"core" Zope 3 that we can manage with the very limited number of  
volunteers we have now.

4. Get more volunteers.

These are just some ideas. But something has to give and I don't  
think it should be responsible bug fixing prior to release.

Jim

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