[Bashburn-info] To release or not to release. That is the question.

[Steven W. O. <st...@sy...>]

I'm mixed on the subject. On the one hand, my industrial experience says 
that we should offer something stable to the public. OTOH, my Cathedral 
and the Bazaar side is screaming that the proper methodolgy is to 
release often. That way people are encouraged to become part of the 
testing base. Even in the small group that we have here, I see fixes 
happening so fast that it would make a commercial manager cry. ;-)

Maybe one way we can go is to have a very regular release of unstable 
releases. If there's a known bug that's a show-stopper then we pull it. So 
far, a know problem has not persisted for more than a few days, and few of 
them made it unusable.

I was an active participant as a user of fetchmail, which was ESR's 
experiment at learning how to do open-source projects. It was a very 
active experience. Lots of people. Very enjoyable, lots of contributors. 
It was the basis for the Bazaar metaphor.

It's official: I'm now dangerous. I just printed out a copy of the svn 
book and I'll read it in the next day or so.

Creation of a devel branch is certainly a good idea. Part of the devel 
branch means that the web page needs to be updated with the appropriate 
command to access it. I'd also recommend sending an entry to freshmeat.net 
to advertise.

Re: i18n

I'm good with how Markus sees the progression. 3.1 will be coming very 
quickly. I can see it done in a couple of weeks.

One thing we can do to get started (Markus) is to change all of the .lang 
files (from what I did earlier) so that instead of strings that are single 
quoted. z.b.

bb_fer_gods_sake='Um Gottes Willen'
so we can start the internationalization process by flipping to 
bb_fer_gods_sake=$"Um Gottes Willen"

This is needed to be able to run bash --dump-po-strings from the Makefile.

Also, when that happens, keep an eye out for things that really should 
have been one thing that were broken apart.

e.g.,

bb_text_5='The directory'
bb_text_6='does not exist, although you wrote it into the configfile'
might become
#bb_text_5=$"The directory %s does not exist, \
although you wrote it into the configfile"

One question I have is, do we know how many users we have? Is there a 
record of downloads? Should we add a "Hello to developers" inside a menu 
or give them a script to send us a postcard?

-- 
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have  .0.
happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
steveo at syslang.net