Re: critical issues

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 10:23:28PM +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
>> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> > This was the result of between 25 to 40 emails in August 2011 on
>> > lilypond-devel.  A quick scan didn't reveal your name amongst
>> > those emails, but we simply cannot afford to revisit every policy
>> > decision every six months because somebody didn't notice or wasn't
>> > interested in the previous discussion.
>> 
>> The labels are not all that interesting to me.  If we don't have
>> developers or users interested in working seriously on or with certain
>> proprietary platforms, then there is no point in calling those platforms
>> supported and stopping the release process for those platforms that
>> _can_ be considered supported.
>
> We could certainly consider dropping support for OSX or windows.

Stopping releases on GNU/Linux is doing as much for supporting OSX or
Windows as throwing away your supper is doing for supporting starving
children.  That sort of token solidarity is actually counterproductive:
if you believe that non-releases lead to non-users, and you think that
non-releases for GNU/Linux may pressure GNU/Linux developers into making
OSX/Windows releases, then how does a non-release for GNU/Linux, with
its corresponding result in decreasing GNU/Linux users and GNU/Linux
developers, help in recruiting GNU/Linux developers that can be
pressured into making OSX and Windows releases?

> That would eliminate 80% (or more!) of our user base, including
> everybody who works on our documentation, plus certain extremely
> valuable developer like Carl... but I suppose that, logically
> speaking, we could consider it.
>
> I am against that idea.

Even if we assume that GNU/Linux releases don't help keeping and gaining
OSX and Windows users, this does not imply that not making GNU/Linux
releases helps keeping and gaining OSX and Windows users.

I am afraid that we are painting ourselves into a corner.  And I don't
think that we are doing ourselves a favor by defining "stable" as "a
random moment when somebody managed to get GUB to run for Windows and
OSX".  We should define "stable" based on the stability and state of the
_actively_ happening development.  _That's_ what we should be cutting
the stable branch from.  And _then_ try getting it ported timely to the
platforms that have, lamentably, a rather lacklustre progress of
releasable material and platform-specific development.  I see very
little correlation between what I'd call a measure of stability, and
what the current set of "Critical bugs" entails.

> Bottom line: I will not be calling anything a "stable release", or
> even a "release candidate", if there are issues which are known to
> fall under the current definition of a "Critical issue".  I am not
> open to changing that definition for at least the next 6 months.

And nobody feels a need to worry about stability if "stable" is not
expected to be around the corner anytime soon for reasons out of his
control (you can't expect people working all too much for systems they
do not even have available for testing purposes).

This is not actually supposed to be a discussion from my side.  It's
more like head-scratching.

-- 
David Kastrup