Xfce 4.4.1 ?

[Jani Monoses]

Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> Harold Aling wrote:
> ...
>> Maybe it's better to have a more 'milestone'-alike release schedule?
> Milestones, roadmaps, those kind of things don't really work for us. We 
> can't usually predict how much time we can spend (or want to spend) on 
> Xfce. Agreeing on some common goals for a release would be good, but I 
> don't think you can expect much more than that.

I also agree that time based rather than milestone based schedule is better.

Distros can plan packaging and stabilization work in advance, developers
work on whatever they wish and declare it stable when it is, and the release team
has a lot less work because the pestering period and coordination overhead are
reduced. I do not see anything becoming more difficult or annoying. Does anyone?

And there's no stress with time based schedule, as there is always a stable component
to include, and if the major releases are made often enough (6 months) there's no
rush for getting things on or otherwise they won't be available for 2 years.

A schedule would encourage new contributors to start picking up bitesized task or
other things that can help the core developers, since knowing that there's a release
soon with one's contributed work is more motivating.

The adoption of time based schedule made projects like GNOME and Xorg a lot better. Ubuntu's
success is also due in part to that.
Xfce is a much smaller project but good ideas apply even on this scale.

>> Also, some projects have no or a lesser active developer. It might 
>> also be a good idea to look at the bugs of other projects and either 
>> resolve them as invalid, request more info or try to build a patch 
>> yourself?
>>
> Yes, anybody could do this, actually. It's a really good way to help us.

This is one area where non-devels could help, but bugzilla has restrictions on who
can triage and close bugs. That's fair enough as it prevents someone uninformed creating
havoc, but it also prevents taking advantage of the community to increase S/N in the bug reports.

Jani