Re: [Plplot-devel] 5.9.7 release timing

[Hazen B. <hba...@ma...>]

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> On 2010-09-24 12:45-0400 Hazen Babcock wrote:
> 
>> Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>>> [...]Is the 5.9.7 development release still on for next
>>> weekend?
>>
>> Yep, assuming that there are no objections.
> 
> Hi Hazen:
> 
> For those who might be doing some last-minute documentation (probably
> not me since I hope to finish the pllegend docbook documentation
> today) what day this weekend and what approximate time of day do you
> plan to start the release process?

I'm planning on doing this tomorrow (Saturday, October 2nd) morning 
(EST), but see discussion below.

> I was about to give you a shopping list of on-going development that
> would justify making the next release cycle our normal longer
> development cycle.  For example, we need to work on plcolorbar to
> complement pllegend.  Also, the misaligned legend results for example
> 26 show a lot of work needs to be done so that plstrl gives the
> correct string-size results for unicode-aware device drivers.
> 
> However, when I checked records, it turns out our last stable release
> (5.8.0) was almost three years ago!  Thus, we have been putting off
> the release of 5.10.0 for much too long a time (probably mostly due to
> my requests for more development release cycles).  But, of course,
> on-going development can always be used to put off stable releases so
> if we don't do a stable release soon, we may never do so. Furthermore,
> I think we could benefit from a short stable release cycle where we
> concentrated exclusively on testing, bug fixing, API propagation, and
> documentation and where the developers made a commitment not to commit
> any new core development work to svn trunk during that short cycle.
> 
> The first obvious question, Hazen, concerning this possibility is
> whether or not you can commit to a short release cycle (say with a
> release of 5.10.0 two or three weeks from the release of 5.9.7 this
> weekend)?

That would probably be possible, but..

> Assuming that short time scale is possible for the next release, what
> do the other developers here think about this possibility?  Would you
> be against it (because you have a lot you want to develop and waiting
> through a stable release cycle disrupts your plans); go along with it
> without participating because of other time-commitments during the
> next few weeks (obviously no shame is attached to that because of the
> extremely short notice); or would you be for it implying you could
> contribute some testing, bug fixing, etc., help during that time?

I am against it, unless we can get pllegend (and plsmema) propogated to 
all the languages before then (as you mentioned below). Also I feel that 
the pllegend API should be stable, and I don't have the sense that it is 
right now. At the rate these things seem to happen I would guess this 
will take a month or more. Then there is the question of whether we'd 
like one more development release to make sure we are comfortable with 
pllegend prior to a stable release.

I'd propose either:

(1) Another dev release 1-2 months after 5.9.7, followed shortly there 
after by 5.10.0.
(2) Hold off on 5.9.7 for another 1-2 months.

In either case we would attempt to restrict our activities between the 
dev release and the stable release as you suggest.

> I would be for it since I could use a week or two to properly test
> PLplot using MinGW under wine, and I hope others would be willing to
> participate as well (say by propagating pllegend to various languages
> and updating examples 4 and 26 in those languages earlier in the
> release cycle and/or running scripts/comprehensive_test.sh for their
> platform and reporting the results on our Wiki later in the release
> cycle).

-Hazen