[boost] Proposal for radically altered approach to releases

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-05-11 10:43:08

The current approach to getting releases ready is completely broken in 
my opinion. Each release requires heroic efforts by the release manager, 
careful attention by many developers, and endless delays until 
everything is just right.

This is discouraging to developers and, worse yet, important library 
upgrades and bug fixes are taking far too long to get into user's hands.

The problems with the current release approach are not caused by release 
managers or developers, but rather by the release system itself. It just 
doesn't scale up to the number of libraries now in Boost, since every 
library has to be ready before a release can occur.

These problems will only grow worse as more libraries are added.

I propose changing to a different release model, one based on always 
maintaining a release-ready stable branch and merging updates for 
individual libraries into it asynchronously.

A draft proposal is available at 
http://mysite.verizon.net/beman/release_overview.html.

I've put a fair amount of thought into this proposal, and have run some 
Subversion simulations to make sure it works smoothly.

What do others think?

--Beman