Re: [Monotone-devel] Release time

[Philipp Gröschler]

On 28.05.2010 10:23, CooSoft Support wrote:
> I couldn't agree more with Thomas's point about Monotone dying if we are
> not careful. It's a psychological thing. `Oh it's only at 0.xxx - still
> unstable'.

Sure it's psychological and nowadays in the age of OSS, versioning
schemes or rather the progress of their numbers are often not really
expressive. Wine took 10 years to release 1.0 and noone really cared in
the end, because it has been working for ages before. On the other hand
I've seen software for example in a 5.x version and was hugely wondering
what that thing did the four major versions before.

People shouldn't look at the numbers of the version but rather on the
feature list on the project's website. Maybe somewhere on that website
there should be included a sentence like "We use it all the time and no
problems so far". Like Jack, I personally use Monotone for all my work
stuff, source codes, server configs, etc. My lady is using Monotone for
her thesis. No problems ever, so count that as +2 from here :-)

One problem of a 1.0 or 1.0.0 release could be, that the more
sophisticated users from bigger development groups, which then start to
use monotone because of the major release, often stick to a version they
chose in the beginning of a project. Of course they still want to have
bugfix releases, but by no means they want breakage in the API or
interface or whatever applies.

I've seen this happen on another project I accompanied a while ago. As
soon as they put out 1.0 there only came bugfix releases afterwards,
although many requests for mostly the same improvements appeared on the
mailing list and the excuse always was like "No we don't do that,
because then we would break with the big guys". Does Monotone have the
power to support two branches, so that new and needed features don't get
stalled?

Just a few thoughts :-)

Philipp