Goals for 0.3.0

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 12:25 -0400, Joe Shaw wrote:
> > > Is this going to be a time-based or feature-based release?
> > 
> > That's a good question, I suppose time based releases would be a good
> > thing given we want stable and development series. I see no cons of this
> > really, only pros, but that just might be me :-)
> > 
> > What's your opinion?
> 
> Time-based releases make a lot of sense when we have people depending on
> us, as part of a development framework.  

Right. Initially, back late last year when I started the hal work, I
wanted to do time-based releases but that was kind of difficult as the
scope was very unclear. With the much clearer scope we've collectively
arrived at during the past few months (I'll summarize it in the spec,
btw), it's a lot easier to do release planning.

> As for 1.0, I don't think a time-based release makes a lot of sense.  I
> mean, we can keep doing time-based 0.x releases forever.  

Right.

> If there ever is a
> freedesktop.org platform, then I think it makes the most sense to fit in
> with that.
> 

That's true, the jury is still out on that one. I'm not really sure
about the cycle time, most projects we want to depend on us (GNOME, KDE,
Mozilla, OO.o, Java etc.) have release cycles of various lengths. As hal
is a relatively little codebase it seems right to have short cycles,
e.g. three or four months.

Another thing is that we need to ensure that we break as little as
possible regarding API/ABI but I think that we can make such promises
partially as the API/ABI is mostly string-based; e.g. from 0.6 and
onwards the storage properties won't change but we don't yet promise
anything about network controller properties.

> We shouldn't
> call something 1.0 until we're ready for it.  (Although sense might
> dictate otherwise... subversion was 0.x for several years when it
> probably could have sanely called itself 1.0, and that has hurt its
> adoption, IMO.)
> 

Good point.

Cheers,
David
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