Re: [boost] [1.36.0] Suggestions for 1.36.0

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-03-29 21:20:24

Richard Newman wrote:
> First off, congratulations on your 1.35.0 R3 and near release.  It's a 
> lot of work updating infrastructure and in the midst of it often thankless.

Thanks, but don't forget the rest of the release team. Rene and Daniel 
did a great job, and many other pitched in from time to time. The folks 
who do the testing are a big part of the process too, and they deserve a 
lot of credit.

> 
> Beman Dawes wrote:
> 
>> Andrey Tcherepanov wrote:
>>> Beman,
>>>
>>> May I humbly suggest "release more often" item as well? Say, as soon as 1  
>>> or 2 new libraries are accepted, merged into release branch and it is  
>>> stable? Or even  "try to release at least last-dot-bug-fix release every  
>>> 2-4 months"?
>> Good points.
>>
>> We are aiming for a quarterly release. 1.35.0 took five months, but our 
>> infrastructure and procedures are improving, so I hope the next one can 
>> be done in three months.
> 
> I'm questioning your point that 1.35.0 took 5 months.

My arithmetic was faulty; we worked on 1.35.0 actively for 6 months.

>  1.34.1 was 
> released on July 24, 2007, more than 8 months ago.  Does this mean you 
> didn't "start" a release until 5 months ago?

Right.

> Is the delay between 
> finishing a release and starting the next one part of the issue in 
> improving the frequency of releases?

Yes. This time we should do a lot better - there be a week or so delay 
while I'm distracted by non-Boost activities, but then we should be able 
to start right away on 1.36.0. And the testing infrastructure is in 
*much* better shape, so we should come up to speed on 1.36.0 work much 
more quickly.

> Should the next release team be 
> ready to go as part of the release process rather than as an afterglow 
> activity?

Yep. We will start that discussion in a day or two.

>> We probably need to be a bit more specific about schedules. For example, 
>> a twelve week schedule might look something like this:
>>
>> * New libraries, major revisions of old libraries, and big 
>> infrastructure changes need to be merged in the first three weeks.
>>
>> * Minor fixes can be merged up until three weeks before the release 
>> target date.
>>
>> * Release candidate generation and review will begin three weeks before 
>> the release target date.
> 
> As a "client" of the boost process, we'd probably upgrade once every 6 
> months, but quarterly gives us a choice of two releases in that period. 
> That choice would depend somewhat on perceived stability. For instance, 
> under the present system, we tend to take the x.y.1 releases over the 
> x.y.0 releases because we perceive the x.y.1 to be of higher 
> reliability.  Longer than 6 months and we start pining away for the new 
> libraries and improvements.
> 
> I'm good with the current paired release heartbeat of library/major 
> additions (x.y.0) and maintenance/reliability improvements (x.y.1), but 
> together each pair should occur at least semi-annually.  Quarterly 
> releases can do this or some other heartbeat.  In principle, 
> monthly/weekly/nightly releases are possible (if testing and building 
> are sufficiently automated), but then certain ones become anointed as 
> the "real" releases anyway.  Regardless, we'll just pick one of them 
> every 6 months to actually deploy.

That's a very reasonable way manage deployment.

We will continue to build nightly snapshots, so those who want to be on 
the bleeding edge can go that route, too.

Thanks for your comments,

--Beman