[Freeciv-Dev] Re: It is feature freeze time

[Jason Short <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Raimar Falke wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 01:34:55AM +0200, Per I. Mathisen wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, Ross W. Wetmore wrote:
> >
> > > The sensible thing for the release beta is to spin off a branch
> > > at feature freeze, and only allow bugfixes on that branch. The
> > > regular CVS mainline can continue as the development branch.
> > >
> > > This sort of process management would probably result in a lot
> > > less apologizing and general irritation all round - especially
> > > that resulting from perceptions of the arbitrary favouritism.
> > >
> > > This also means you can continue beta fixing as long as you need
> > > to get the thing stable without pressure from developers or
> > > losing those you have, so there are benefits on both sides.
> > On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, Jason Short wrote:
> >
> > > I'd like to again suggest the use of CVS branches to minimize the
> > > downtime from a feature freeze.
> > This has been up before... Actually, I remember suggesting this myself
> > earlier. But I'm not sure about this.
>
> > I want people here to make an effort to debug what we have now so that we
> > can ship it.
>
> I also see this problem. We have to avoid splitting the developers
> base.
>
> Now that the sound is in I have thought about the time schedule. I
> have drawn one IMHO important conclusion:
>
>   After we released the current version we will set a time (say 3
>   months) and than really freeze the tree at that day. Even when the
>   most impressive feature is just to be applied. Even if is it "ready
>   for inclusion". It will have to wait.
>
> This may sound drastic but I don't see another way. From Jan till now
> we have only got the sound in (two major goals were still open, one
> has been dropped now). During this time the sound patch was changed in
> a major way (the complete way how the information is transfered from
> the server to the client was revised).
I actually do agree that a system like this could work well, but you 
would really need some branching to allow development to continue during 
the (unknown length of time) testing cycle.
> So I learned that the original way posted in Jan from me was wrong. I
> would like to try the beta time with no extra branches and see what
> will happen. It may also be helpful if Jason can describe (I wasn't
> following the development very precisely at these days) what was the
> problem at the previous beta time. Just too many bugs found? No fixes
> were posted? Posted fix weren't committed?
As I recall (and I didn't do much on FreeCiv in those days, but perhaps 
the FreeCivAC people could tell some bitter stories), there was a 
general agreement that a release would come "real soon now" and that 
nothing that was not release-related was put into CVS.  But for a long 
time the release goal came no closer.
This isn't too much different from the situation of the past couple of 
months, BTW...but it was much more severe.
jason