[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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