[Bashburn-info] To release or not to release. That is the question.
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From: Steven W. O. <st...@sy...> - 2008-09-12 02:16:09
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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 |