[Zope3-dev] Re: Release schedule for Zope 2.11/3.4?

[Martin Aspeli]

Hanno Schlichting wrote:

>> What do you think about a 9 month release cycle?
> 
> Based on the Plone experience I think this is a good compromise, between
> release often and stable releases.

The Plone experience as I see it is that we get some measure of 
contribution fatigue.

Take Plone 2.5 and 3.0. With the cycles of review bundles (similar to 
Zope proposals and discussions), development of new features, bug fixes, 
merging to alphas, releasing betas and rcs, we found that we basically 
had to get started on 3.0 just as (if not before) 2.5 final went out the 
door. That's pretty exhausting. People pull together on bugdays and 
their spare time to get a particular release out, and then they are 
being hounded for the next release already.

In other words - 6 months is a really short time, especially if you 
expect to have a reasonable alpha and beta cycle where things stabilise. 
And further, it's very hard to get people to work on two releases 
simultaneously (polishing x whilst starting on x+1).

I agree that 9 months is a better compromise. 12 months is a very long 
time. The other important thing is to manage scope - let people know 
quite early what is and what isn't in scope for a particular release and 
set clear, agreed-upon timelines for things like proposal deadlines, 
feature freezes, and alpha/beta releases.

Just my opinion, of course.

Martin