Release Strategy & Versioning Proposed Changes - CalVer and Quarterly Recommended Releases

Panther

@LaFayette That appears to be a good and understandable system.

ubernaut

LaFayette

One big variable, is the cadence, how often for recommended releases.
Once a year? Twice? Three times, four times?

There's a concern that if activity drops to be lower, then we might have recommended releases that contain very little. I wonder a bit if 3 times might be the sweet spot. Any thoughts?

beelee

@LaFayette

Nice work

I would think fewer as opposed to more, as the majority of Players don't upgrade that often

TheDog

@LaFayette
Lets try 3 times a year, hopefully it can be easily changed if required.

beelee

Perhaps for the first time, you can check in a couple weeks ahead of whatever release cycle is decided on and if it has low activity, move it to the next cycle ?

Idk if that is practical.

Panther

@LaFayette said:

One big variable, is the cadence, how often for recommended releases.
Once a year? Twice? Three times, four times?

There's a concern that if activity drops to be lower, then we might have recommended releases that contain very little. I wonder a bit if 3 times might be the sweet spot. Any thoughts?

I'd suggest two times, as there are times where coding activity goes down to almost zero, as well as times where it is quite high (currently). So two times seems to be a realistic frame.

LaFayette

@Panther Ubuntu releases twice a year, so there is precedent there.

I feel like TripleA gets an uptick in activity before Thanksgiving. Having players upgrade before then feels to make sense.

So, if we do twice a year, that would be be a Nov 1st recommended release and then a May 1st recommended release. That is probably a good place as any to start. We'll target to get this next release out ASAP and then the next scheduled recommended release to be Nov 1st.

Cernel

@LaFayette said:

So, if we do twice a year, that would be be a Nov 1st recommended release and then a May 1st recommended release. That is probably a good place as any to start.

As a non-developer, I would go with whenever tends to be the period when developers have more free time (asking the other main developers).

(I think more people being online during releases can be argued either way about being a good or bad thing.)

I would actually go with quarterly "releases", so, when one gets skipped, it becomes a 6 months wait rather than an 1 year wait (and 9 months instead of 1.5 years if two get skipped).

Cernel

On the other hand, to minimize the risk of burn-out in doing such a thing (which I guess is easily done but very unengaging especially in case of problems emerging right after the community at large gets to "test"), the best choice would be doing it only once per year and exactly in the time of the year (whatever it is) where developers tend to have more free time and more willingness of using their free time to manage TripleA. Add to that that, if one thing happens once a year, it is much easier for a person immediately to remember "it's TripleA release time", so it can become more easily part of the tribal knowledge of the community (meaning that people will be more likely to accept problems as part of an expected process rather than feeling like the developers are randomly thowing lemons at them) if the process becomes consolidated.