ToDo Task List
- Define problem Wade Chandler
- Based on some feasible ways of working on code repositories and builds, write up some release cycle choices Wade Chandler
- Start an email thread on this topic to get others to contribute Wade Chandler
- Make a proposal for further discussion Wade Chandler
- Call for a vote Wade Chandler
Fairly recently, NetBeans major releases try to align with JDK releases. This doesn't seem a feasible future cycle time necessarily, and too, NetBeans supporting more Java features isn't necessarily a "major" release depending on that Java release. The minor releases also take a bit of time as it stands today. This affects users and contributors in different ways, but two big negatives of this approach are 1) users waiting a long time for features or fixes and 2) contributors waiting an annoying and sometimes technically crippling long time for their hard work to be reflected in a release of the Platform or IDE which they can readily use in a "released" state.
This document aims to focus on releasing better, and nailing down a sustainable cycle time hopefully following a model such as Google Chrome where some updates can be faster than others, but generally driven by whatever development workflows we setup per other discussions and proposals.
Imagine today you are a contributor to NetBeans. You have an actual day job which sadly isn't being able to work on NetBeans. So, you spend a couple weeks or months of your spare time to fix something about the IDE or platform which bothers or affects you. You are diligent, work hard, and get the patch accepted, and see it in the main-golden daily builds. Great Job!!! Surely you will see this change appear in the auto-updates shortly after (just a few days or less)!
No, you won't! It may be months before you can use this hard won victory unless you use the daily built IDE or artifacts. Perhaps in better circumstances this would always be a great thing to do, but per the current release cycles, and the tail end stabilization phase, make this difficult. Would you find that hard to swallow? Does that thought make you want to contribute? More likely it suppresses that desire. So, let's make this better!