[MPlayer-dev-eng] release... WHEN?

[Anders Johansson]

Hi again (sorry for all the noise),

> On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 02:01:56PM +0800, Anders Johansson wrote:
> > Hi (this is not a flame bait),
> > 
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > Hey, i really don't know what to do...
> > > release pre10 tomorrow, so ppl angry by pre9's bugs will be happy, and the
> > > recently added features will be tested, or wait a few more days, while teh
> > > code stabilizes again and bugs are found&fixed.
> > > 
> > > Actually people (including me :)) can't stay commiting new features, fixes
> > > etc, so the code is never stable :)
> > > and it's ok this way, no one (except the doc team :)) likes code freezee...
> > 
> > How about branching ?
> 
> It's been discussed before and I believe the answer was no that time
> too. Isn't it obvious that MPlayer development works very well as-is?
> When you have to drink 10l every time you screw up cvs, people tend to
> keep it in working order without silly things like freezes. :))


Well the project is starting to become quite big. I ran this:

wc `find . | awk '/h$|c$|Makefile/'`

the main directory, and came up with 270309 lines of code. Also have a
look at the CVS trafic it is almost 1M/month (compressed), that's also
quite a lot. 

Perhaps it is time to modify the way releases are done. I am not good
at project management but I have read some about it, that might be
helpful:

The Cathedral an the Bazaar:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html

Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and mozilla:
http://www.research.avayalabs.com/user/audris/papers/mozilla.pdf