Re: [Monotone-devel] Release time

[CooSoft Support]

Philipp Gröschler wrote:
> 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.
>   
IMHO

I agree that's how techies work, oooh looks cool I'll give that a spin. 
But, and pardon me for saying this, SCM systems are the sort of tools 
that techies don't get too excited about generally, and just want 
something that works and is reliable, and so may only look more 
superficially because they want to get back to doing `cool stuff'. Also 
the dreaded management peeps stick their oar in and start going on about 
trusting our crown jewels to `something that isn't formally released 
yet'. I had to fight for about 6 months on and off to keep the 
management off our backs otherwise we would have been forced to use 
ClearCase. It would have been easier to convince them of mtn's stability 
if it was at 1.x rather than 0.x. I know, silly, but we are talking 
about management after all.

Your point about version 5.x and wondering reminds me of TopCased. It's 
at version 2 and as stable as a Jenga tower! Makes me wonder what 1.x 
was like :-(.

Point taken about 1.0 forcing you to not break things. Changing schemas 
is no biggie, easy for a user to cope with, db migrate or sync. CLI is 
unlikely to change that much (at least I hope not) as that is one of its 
many selling points. CVS/SVN users can virtually use it straight away 
(unlike GIT), even ClearCase users (mind you they are usually so 
thankful not to be using ClearCase).

au stdio, hopefully will mainly be additive from now on (I hope! - lol).

As for feature freeze. We have had to do that for our software. We 
currently have ~10 release branches and develop on the latest version 
whilst supplying patch fixes to 8 year old releases. That's why we love 
Monotone, it makes it so easy :-). Comes with the territory of doing 
something people want I'm afraid.
> 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 :-)
>   
Agreed but some peeps do :-(
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Monotone-devel mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
>