[josm-dev] JOSM-Tested

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 16:49, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
> Matthias Julius writes:
>  > I am not saying we should hold development until all translations are
>  > complete.  I would just like to give translators a chance to get their
>  > translation into a released JOSM.
>
> JOSM has never been released.
>
> Or, to put it another way, the JOSM release process is broken.  JOSM
> is never released. People are simply told that a certain SVN version
> is better than other versions, and that version gets compiled for
> them.  That's IT.  As a former release manager for several projects,
> this frustrates the bejeezus out of me.

(I'm not a JOSM dev)

I think JOSM's release process is awesome. Projects like JOSM that do
monthly releases tend to constantly keep the code in what's basically
a ready-to-release state. I actually don't use the releases, I just
track trunk.

But the releases aren't just an arbitrary monthly snapshot. The devs
make an effort to close any remaining blocker bugs before a release,
but of course with everyone being a volunteer that doesn't always get
done optimally.

Of course there are some things that could be done better, like a
translation freeze a few days before release. But now we only have 8
languages with >85% complete translations, so that's a relatively
recent problem.

Small-ish projects like JOSM can actually become much worse for their
users if they do "proper" releases. I.e. something where there's a
maintenance branch that gets maintained in paralell, and things only
get merged there once they're sure to work. Doing stuff like that
takes a lot of manpower.