[Libreoffice-qa] Lifecycle of builds?

[Robinson Tryon]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 4:08 AM, Petr Mladek <pmladek at suse.cz> wrote:
> Robinson Tryon píše v St 10. 04. 2013 v 11:29 -0400:
>> So would we provide an EOL date for each point release in a series, or
>> just a single EOL date for all of our 3.6.x released builds?
>
> I think that only the single EOL date make sense. We do not provide
> bugfix releases for bugfix releases. We provide bugfix releases for the
> minor version X.Y.

+1

>>  Perhaps we could add some language on the ReleasePlan page to
>> help telegraph the impending end of the series?
> ...
> I have updated the table title at
> https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan to mention
> "basic dates for the initial and bugfix releases". I wonder if this
> might be enough.

I think that helps a bit. I believe I understand the situation a bit
better now that we've had the conversation, but I'm still slightly
confused about the versioning, and that makes me wonder if users would
also find themselves confused :-)

Taking the 3.6 branch as an example, the first release came out by Aug
12th., after which point there were no new major/minor builds until
4.0 was released just after 3.6.5 in February. That means that for 6
months, the 3.6 branch was our most up-to-date release. That also
means (if I understand correctly) that we didn't ship any new features
for 6 months. Is that correct?

>> Ah, okay, so perhaps a new column in the table:
>>
>> 3.6.0 - early adopters
>> 3.6.1 - (or maybe 'unstable'? marketing would hate that..)
>> 3.6.2 - (Better: leave it empty until we can mark it 'stable' :-)
>> 3.6.3 - stable
>> ...
>> 3.6.6 - bugfix
>> 3.6.7 - bugfix
>
> I would prefer to avoid these statements. Every release is different.
> Some are pretty good from the .0 release. Some need more love. In
> addition, it is individual. Some bugs might be critical for a certain
> group of users and uninteresting for others.

Fair enough. As I said above, I guess I'm just trying to make better
sense of the nature of the point releases.

Cheers,
--R