[josm-dev] JOSM releases

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

   Imi has originally had the idea of JOSM "releases" every now and
then (it amounted to about twice a year), with josm-latest being just
for the adventurous.

This has proven to be next to untenable; for any kind of serious work,
the "release" version was generally unsuitable. 

On the one hand it may be worthwile to have a playground for new
features and so on, migrating them into a proper release once they're
stable. On the other hand, nobody really does any testing of "alpha"
features anyway.

I am unsure how we should proceed with this in the future. Should we
aim to have a "stable" and a "latest" version? If yes, should we keep
them in separate SVN branches and fix bugs in the "stable" versions as
well, or should we consider the "stable" version an unmodifiable
snapshot?

I think I am mildly in favour of an Ubuntu-like system where we set up
a fixed release schedule (say: once a month, released on the first day
of the month - makes version naming easy). That version would normally
be unchanged throughout the month unless important bugs are fixed; at
the end of each month we would normally merge all features added
during that month, unless they are still rather unstable.
 
But I have little experience in version control and release cycles and
thus I'm very interested in what others have to say about this.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'