4.7 - again

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Oct 20, 2017, at 7:07 AM, Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I'll pause doing (small) features now. I already have one or two smalls
>> things ready but they have to wait for post 4.7.
> 
> yes, feature locking sounds very reasonable at this stage - i.e. BETA.

Just FYI, I am NOT planning on doing a beta. We have been asking random
people to "try the daily test builds" when they have problems - and in general
I never felt that the beta really got us that much more dedicated testing.

I'm planning to simply release 4.7 this weekend.

>> Unfortunately I constantly stumble across small bugs at the moment. Will
>> still try to fix a few more.
>> 
> 
> that's where the "release-small, release-often" model works great:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often
> 
> i haven't read this in a book or something, i just saw it in action in
> a big public closed source project...it works great.
> aaand i think i've proposed this at least 3 times the past 6 years. :-)

We have done so for a while and then fell off the wagon again. The problem
is that we keep focusing on different things and get distracted. And that's mainly
a problem of too few developers in certain roles. And the biggest choke point,
quite frankly, am I.
Having multiple people deal with merges on GitHub seems to have really help,
thanks for initiating that, Lubomir. We now need to get a second developer who
really looks after each platform. And who has at least some time to do so.

Android we seem to have a few people who build their own APKs and who fix
if things get broken.

iOS I think I'm back to being the only one - Robert tried for a while.

Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE each have a few people who build locally,
but only openSUSE has another repo owner who simply fixes things in the 
build as they crop up

AppImage is just me (and that's my own fault for not making it possible for
others to contribute and help - I need to fix that).

Windows has Lubomir as the only one building natively, and Stefan appears
to be using my scripts for MXE

Mac is mostly myself, occasionally Robert.

If every platform had a co-owner who worked on keeping that platform building
and working, then more frequent releases would be much easier to do.

> what i propose:
> 
> 1) add "daily" links next to the the official download link on the website
> i'm pretty sure we already point a lot of people to the daily links.

I stopped calling them 'daily' because that implies that they happen, you know,
roughly every day and they definitely do not. And there's a huge risk in that because
we do break those test builds. And sometimes pretty badly.

> 2) the community is the QA team (like we already do that)
> e.g. Rick saw a crash yesterday, he immediately reported it, but it
> wasn't the latest build and we already have a fix for that.
> the software crashing is not that dangerous.

Not sure what your point is here - what do you propose?

> 3) we only announce MINOR bumps to social media.
> we announce PATCH bumps *only* at the website and do PATCH bump more often too.
> put the change log on the website - the dev. team can help to update that.

Again, not sure what you propose here. Consider the test builds
"official"? No, I don't like that. We need to streamline the sub-minor
builds like we did for a while. Create 4.7.1 and on at least once a month.

> i will add Dirk and Linus to CC, to see if they want to trigger this
> change one day.

I appreciate the input, and I'd love to hear what others think.
But exposing every user to the test builds seems wrong to me.

/D