[Scummvm-devel] Release plans
Max Horn
max at quendi.de
Thu Feb 5 13:30:06 CET 2004
Yo folks,
ScummVM always has had a problem with making releases -- making them in
time, making them regularly. We never seem to be able to get releases
out when we want to; it always takes us ages to get out new releases.
We can't release when we want to, and when we release we usually have
problems with ongoing works delaying it. Etc.
This situation is a bit unsatisfying, IMO. Having frequent releases
(monthly, or bimonthly) would be a nice things for various reasons,
again IMO. It would mean broader testing; less people would be forced
to use our daily builds, which means less people would run into broken
daily builds. It would make constant quality control a bit easier:
instead of having to do a *lot* of testing after 6 months of
development (and as such having to always ask people "Which build did
this happen with?"), we could refer people to specific builds.
One of the primary problem hindering us from doing this seems to be a
"lack of focus". What I mean with that is: we simply have no well
defined way to decide when to make a release. Usually we wait till
"enough" changes have accumulated. Of course that is an extremely fuzzy
measure. Which shows :-).
So, maybe we should try to come up with a slightly better organized
approach. Like, making a list of goals we set for ourselves, and which
we try (actively) to reach before we make a new release. Clearly, this
shouldn't be anything set into stone -- if a problem turns out harder
than expect (or we have less resources, like time, than was hoped), we
can move it to a later release; and vice versa we can of course do
additional things in each release.
The point, though, is that this way we can better define how far away a
release is. We might even want to set ourselves fixed dates when we
target our next couple releases; once again, we don't have to
religiously stick to those dates, but simply the attempt to do so will
lead to a more structured development process, I think.
So, in summary, I guess what I want to say is that it would be nice to
come up with a release plan, and with a target list for each release.
Something like the following (fictional dates!):
0.6.0: Branch 2004-02-06 (Friday), Release 2004-02-13
0.6.1 (if necessary) released based on branch, with critical bug fixes
CVS HEAD gets renamed to 0.6.99 or so
0.7.0: Branch 2004-04-02 (Friday), Release 2004-04-09
Goals:
GUI: Add all options to launcher
Scumm: Smooth scrolling in V7/V8 games
Simon: ...
Global: Add engine for game XYZ
0.8.0: Branch 2004-06-04, ...
...
In addition to this, we may want to think about whether we ever want to
reach 1.0, and if so, what version to assign. Personally, I think we
could already now call ourselves a "1.0" product, except that I'd like
to see (G)UI improvements, and also better docs, before that... what do
others think?
Cheers,
Max
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