[ros-dev] New Release - how're you feeling?

[Murphy, Ged (Bolton)]

Craig Talbert wrote:

> On 6/22/05, Murphy,  Ged (Bolton) <MurphyG at cmpbatteries.co.uk> wrote:
>  
> > We need regular releases to keep public interest. New releases 
> > generate interest outside of the community, which can only 
> be a good 
> > thing, even if they don't contain radical new features.
> 
> I would be very careful about mixing concern for generating 
> more interest in to a release policy that might give a false 
> impression of the progress being made on the project.
> 
> It does give me a warm fuzzy feeling to see the version 
> number go up on reactos.com -- on (almost) any f/oss project 
> for that matter.  But I if I discovered the progress being 
> made was misrperesented, I might lose trust in the people 
> working on the project.  Trust is important, and if we can 
> gain the trust of end users, that's something we'll have that 
> microsoft never really earned. :)


This is a good point. However we're only talking about a minor release.
Minor releases generally only consist of bug fixes and small improvements /
functionality. 

0.2.6 was a particularly bad release, and at the moment, (not counting the
header rewrites currently taking place) HEAD is much more stable and usable.

0.3 is meant to be the big bang release where users are blown away, not
minor releases. To take Alex's earlier comparison, the Linux kernel often
jumps minor releases (2.6.*) with no obvious improvements. You generally
have to read the changelog to see what has changed (and if it's worth you
upgrading)

Again, my point is; if we're not going to do anymore 0.2.* releases, then we
could be in for a long wait before networking is at a stage which meets the
0.3 criteria. 

Ged.





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