[Python-Dev] Regular scheduled releases (was: Continuing 2.x)

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 21:54, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> Another quick thought. What would people think about regular timed releases if python 2.7?  This is probably more a question for Benjamin but doing sonmight provide better predictability and "customer service" to our users. I might like to see monthly releases but even quarterly would probably be useful. Doing timed releases might also incentivize folks to fix more outstanding 2.7 bugs.

I would really like to see a more regular and frequent release
schedule. Most of my experience with this is with Mercurial, where we
have a time-based schedule with a feature release every four months
and a bugfix release at least every month (usually at the first of
each month) and more often if we have bad regressions. It's nice
because (a) release are practiced more and therefore become easier to
do, (b) regressions can be fixed in a shorter timeframe. A predictable
schedule is also just nice for all parties involved.

In Gentoo, we actually started taking backports from the maintenance
branches to fix issues (regressions) in our packages, but didn't work
out so well. Obviously a random snapshot from SVN (even from a stable
branch) isn't exercised as well as an actual release, so we ended up
having some issues due to that. Also releasing packages with a version
number that doesn't fully correspond to the tarball is less than ideal
(we mitigated this somewhat by adding a date tag to the packages, but
still).

Here are the bugfix releases from the 2.6 branch:

2.6.1: 64 days
2.6.2: 131 days
2.6.3: 174 days
2.6.4: 23 days (critical regressions)
2.6.5: 145 days
2.6.6: 158 days

That's an average of 4 (if you include .4) or 4.5 months (PEP 6
specifies 6 months, but some of the parts seem outdated). I think
releasing each month might be a bit ambitious, but it would be great
to drive down the release interval towards 2-3 months instead of 4-5.

Cheers,

Dirkjan