Comments on: TG2, and Release Management

By: Setuptools, Package indexes, and releases at Compound Thinking

Setuptools, Package indexes, and releases at Compound Thinking — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:02:33 +0000

[...] it’s in that light that I’m thinking about a time based release schedule makes sense. It’s not so much that we need to change the core [...]

By: Interstellar Medium: the Free Software carnival » Free Software Carnival: 28 June – 4 July

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:09:02 +0000

[...] Mark Ramm-Christensen is contemplating release schedules for TurboGears 2. [...]

By: Mark Ramm

Mark Ramm — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:35:31 +0000

Aigars,

That is a very good point. But I think Ubuntu and TG are different because TG is aimed at developers who use it to create new applications, not at end-users.

Developers seem to have a different level of willingness to deal with upgrades. I do think our goal post TG2 is to have incremental improvement with minimal API change and very minimal application breakage. And I’m not suggesting that people have to upgrade every 6 months, certianly we’d want to have much longer support timelines for at least some releases.

But perhaps that’s not enough, and 6 months is too often to cut a release. That’s what I’m trying to figure out at this point. ;)

By: Aigars Mahinovs

Aigars Mahinovs — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:22:27 +0000

Ubuntu can get away with 6 month releases and 1 year support window only because it is trivial to upgrade from one release to the next in a fully automatic manner. *IF* you can make and fully test tools that would take a TG1 project and output a fully functional TG2 project (possibly with notes about changed things and with good and descriptive error messages in case the automatic upgrade is not possible describing both why and how to fix it), then such releases would be feasible.

I have the feeling that to get the resources to do such a thing you would need to gather a bunch of companies developing mission-critical web sites in TG that would pay you to develop TG while keeping their sites non-broken trough the upgrades.

Contact Mark Shuttleworth from Ubuntu, maybe he can help in some way or form.