[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: Advocating periodic releases

[Dana Hudes]

Roman Shaposhnik wrote:
> On Oct 6, 2006, at 10:47 AM, Clarke, Trevor wrote:
>> When it's time for a release, the CM person tags the trunk to a release
>> tag, performs addition tests, builds installers, etc. These tags are
>> read-only for all but the CM person (subversion allows fine grained
>> read-only/read-write/no-access per user (and for anonymous) on all
>> directories in a repo)
>
>   How do you balance a need to continue with the development work
> but also stabilizing the trunk during the release time ? Does your
> development work just cease for the duration of putting a release
> out the door ?
>
> Thanks,
> Roman.
Releases and development updates need to be separated into bugfix and 
new feature. I include performance tweaks in "new feature" though of 
course if something runs in, say, O(n**2) time and you can get that to 
O(n log n) that's pretty compelling if true (and if O(n**2) time is 
noticeable in the first place....don't care about shaving 500 
miliseconds on a 1GHZ machine, but taking 60 seconds to 20 is pretty 
compelling). I don't say that people can't or shouldn't put in changes 
to tweak whatever they want but rather that we need stability in order 
to gain wider adoption. Every developer likes to write new stuff. Bug 
fixes aren't as much fun and this is all volunteer so a delicate balance 
has to be struck between encouraging new functions and fixing what we 
have. The new stuff needs to go out in a reasonable time to keep the 
egoboo flowing -- its no fun to write stuff nobody gets to use.