On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 19:50 +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:
Hello everyone,
We (the platform release team) have a policy question about the Haskell Platform. We're asking here because we think the libraries list is the right authority to decide.
The Haskell Platform concept calls for major and minor releases.
I should probably point out the strategy we are trying to implement: time based releases rather than feature based. An excellent source on this issue is Martin Michlmayr's PhD thesis in which he argues for time based releases: Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free and Open Source Software Projects: Exploring the Impact of Release Management http://www.cyrius.com/publications/michlmayr-phd.html It is extremely relevant to us. He surveys many similar projects like GCC, GNOME, Debian and others.
From the abstract:
This dissertation explores why, and under which circumstances, the time based release strategy is a viable alternative to feature-driven development and discusses factors that influence a successful implementation of this release strategy. It is argued that this release strategy acts as a coordination mechanism in large volunteer projects that are geographically dispersed. The time based release strategy allows a more controlled development and release process in projects which have little control of their contributors and therefore contributes to the quality of the output. Shorter references, pertaining to GNOME: http://www.linux.com/articles/114247 http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/TimeBased http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-June/msg00041.html Duncan