[FFmpeg-devel] release feedback

[Robert Swain]

On 16/3/09 00:04, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> Robert Swain<robert.swain at gmail.com>  writes:
>> On 15/3/09 11:56, Diego Biurrun wrote:
>>> On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 09:16:32PM +0000, Robert Swain wrote:
>>>> One item of note that is not related to this thread: while Attila is an
>>>> excellent server administrator and provides us with a very good server,
>>>> the response time for the server 'failure' we experienced severely
>>>> stunts development.
>>> A day of downtime every other year or even less is quite a good service
>>> and does IMO not noticeably affect development.
>> Indeed, OK.
>>
>>>>> One question that remains is whether we should repeat this regularly or
>>>>> at all.  Given the positive feedback, I believe we should institute a
>>>>> regular release schedule.  I envision time-based releases every 3 or 6
>>>>> months.  After some thought, 6 months sounds preferable.  It is less
>>>>> disruptive to the development process and a schedule that seem to work
>>>>> well in a lot of other FOSS projects.
>>>> I would like 3-monthly releases.
>>> Why?
>> FFmpeg development is very rapid. If we space releases too sparsely, we
>> (the developers) will have less faith in releases and this will transfer
>> into telling users to use trunk more due to the previous release being
>> outdated. I think this devalues releases.
>
> Any given version is likely to be outdated in 24h.

Troll?

In a 6 month period, it is pretty much guaranteed that a slew of new 
formats have been integrated, existing formats will have received a 
number of changes and the core of FFmpeg will have received some 
non-trivial changes. 3-4 months gives time for change but not so much 
time that the step between releases is very large.

If we keep a regular release schedule, third party software may want to 
only make releases against our release code because it should represent 
better stability than a random snapshot. As such distributions should 
also be more likely to ship releases than a random snapshot. Waiting 6 
months delays features and fixes getting into the wild.

Regards,
Rob