4.7 - again

[Lubomir I. Ivanov]

On 20 October 2017 at 14:48, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.

i can start doing the MXE, eventually.
have never tried it!

>
>> 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.
>

i would say that a "unstable" build crashing is part of the risks
users take when they download a build marked as test/unstable.
they help us developer the app by testing this build.
do you mean huge *legal* risks? can we use a DISCLAIMER?

>> 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.

to clarify:
with 2 + 3 my point is that we can expose unstable PATCH bumps or even
sub-PATCH bumps to the public and users act as the QA team via a link
with a warning.

>
>> 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.

me too.

> But exposing every user to the test builds seems wrong to me.
>

usually a small link on the download site is enough,  with the
following context:
1) here are our test/unstable/daily builds
2) here is the changelog for them
3) use at your own risk (disclaimer) - unstable, may crash, data may be lost
4) help us - feedback appreciated

2c
lubomir
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