[python-committers] [PSF-Members] Code Simplicity » Open Source Community, Simplified

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le jeudi 03 février 2011 à 09:01 +0100, Georg Brandl a écrit :
> I don't think branching off at beta1 is helpful.  Developers will happily
> continue adding features to trunk (because that's what's fun, isn't it),
> and not care much about the release branch.  Obviously we want the opposite,
> and we want them to concentrate on bug fixing.

I'm obviously not in a position to judge, but I find it interesting that
you're arguing precisely for what the article says is better abandoned
(according, apparently, to a numerical study of community activity):

        Graph analysis showed very clearly that every time we would
        freeze, the community would shrink drastically and it would take
        several months after we un-froze for the size of the community
        to recover. It happened uniformly, every single time we would
        freeze, over many years and many releases.
        
        [...]
        
        We addressed this issue by *never* freezing the trunk. [...] We
        are also doing feature development on the trunk *simultaneously*
        with those bug fixes. However, we’ve found that not only does
        the community expand more rapidly this way, but we also actually
        get our releases out more quickly than we used to. So it’s a
        win-win situation.

(emphasis mine)

Regards

Antoine.