[sldev] Closing out the merge window

[Melinda Green]

That's a great question. Even though in theory this could be a 
continuous release process, there are some practical reasons to do it in 
cycles. The main reason is that during the normal phase where features 
are added and changed, we will naturally introduce bugs that tend to 
accumulate over time. The stabilization phases bring the bug levels down 
to acceptable levels. If it ever turned out code quality stayed high 
enough throughout development then you could make a great case for 
skipping this bit of protocol but I doubt that will ever happen and I 
think that's OK.

Another good reason for having release cycles is so that other parties 
can plan around them. One such party is LL who will want to cherry-pick 
from highly stable versions in order to inherit the fewest bugs in the 
process. Another party is the casual user who will only be willing to 
upgrade occasionally and will want to know which versions to grab. Yet 
another party is you!  :-)  Your private branch or copy that you work in 
will drift from the main Snowglobe branch and if your do a substantial 
(i.e. destabilizing) amount of work, you will want to merge approved 
changes back to Snowglobe when it is in a most stable phase so that the 
problems you introduce are most easily fixed. Even if you only intend to 
make small, infrequent changes, you will want to do that work when 
Snowglobe is most stable.

I don't think that having a release cycle fragments a product. It simply 
regularizes the natural ebb and flow of quality and lets people plan 
around it. It's fine if we decide that Snowglobe's quality does not need 
to be as high as the main LL viewer (at the points where *its* quality 
is highest in its cycle). We just need to decide what our quality 
standard should be and then adjust the length of our stabilization 
phases in order to hit that target.

-Melinda

Mike Monkowski wrote:
> What's the point of RC and Release?  Isn't every incarnation of 
> Snowglobe going to be equivalent to a First Look stable build?  I don't 
> remember First Look going through a RC then Release series?
>
> The changes will go through the RC and Release series if they get cherry 
> picked for the standard viewer.
>
> If you go with another RC series, then you'll have people running 
> Snowglobe out of SVN builds, RC builds, and Release builds.  You don't 
> have a very big audience as it is.  Fragmenting it won't help.  Everyone 
> will be aware that Snowglobe is an Alpha release.
>
> Snowglobe needs more than just minor bug fixes.  See my comment at 
> https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-13437
>
> I think http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Snowglobe_Current_Cycle needs a 
>   link to a JIRA query that will generate a list of open issues.  I 
> don't know how to make such a query, though.
>
> Mike
>
> Aimee Trescothick wrote:
>   
>> On 20 May 2009, at 23:50, Mike Monkowski wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> I thought you still have crashing and freezing problems.  Is it really
>>> ready to ship?
>>>       
>> Closing the merge window doesn't mean ready to ship, just no new  
>> features this cycle. Next follows the Stabilzation phase for bug  
>> fixing, at the end of which we have RC and finally Release, before  
>> starting all over again.
>>
>> https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/ 
>> SLDev_Viewer_Development_Process#Release_cycle
>>
>> Aimee.
>>
>>     
>
> _______________________________________________
> Policies and (un)subscribe information available here:
> http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev
> Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
>
>