[Python-Dev] Community buildbots (was Re: User's complaints) (original) (raw)

Anthony Baxter anthony at interlink.com.au
Fri Jul 14 07:51:00 CEST 2006

On Friday 14 July 2006 06:05, Barry Warsaw wrote:

This really is an excellent point and makes me think that we may want to consider elaborating on the Python release cycle to include a gamma phase or a longer release candidate cycle. OT1H I think there will always be people or projects that won't try anything until the gold release, and that if we've broken anything in their code we simply won't know it until after that, no matter how diligent we are. OTOH, a more formal gamma phase would allow us to say "absolutely no changes are allowed now unless it's to fix backward compatibility". No more sneaking in new sys functions or types module constants during the gamma phase.

alpha 1: April 5, 2006 [completed]
alpha 2: April 27, 2006 [completed]
beta 1:  June 20, 2006 [completed]
beta 2:  July 11, 2006 [completed]
rc 1:    August 1, 2006 [planned]
final:   August 8, 2006 [planned]

Four months would seem to me to be quite long enough as a release cycle. Extending it means far more work for everyone - either we have special checkin rules for the trunk for a longer period of time (requiring extra monitoring by people like myself and Neal), or we branch earlier, requiring double commits to the trunk and the branch for bugfixes.

I also strongly doubt that making a longer "release candidate" cycle would lead to any significant additional testing by end-users.

Anthony

Anthony Baxter <anthony at interlink.com.au> It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

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