Don't forget that AB3 is also old (since last august) and, in reality, is one of the longer releases we've had
6 months is double the usual time for a (non-final) Neo milestone to be out there.
Actually, 6 - 9 months is the norm. The first Neo 2.0 Alpha came out in early 2006 (about 6 months before Aqua Beta). Sure, we did an separate Alpha for Intel, but that was using the same OOo release. Before the first 2.0 Alpha, the last big upgrade release was in summer of 2005 when we did the Neo 1.2.x series.
You were doing 3-month releases in the late-0.x and 1.1 era, but you were much younger then My point was that as the scale of the project and the code has increased, the required development/shake-out time has had to increase (double), too, but I guess that wasn't clear in what I said
pluby wrote:
Doing releases every 3 months is not really feasible.
That seems apparent for a mature project; you could do that for 0.x and 1.1 because there was so much to implement and there were relatively "little" discreet bits that brought big functionality improvements to users. Now it's about that last 5%, which is neither fast nor simple nor discreet—nor easy.
pluby wrote:
Just doing 3 Early Access runs three months apart to squeeze the Intel release in had a huge negative impact on my health.
As Oscar would say, "it's only software; be sure to take care of yourself."
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 6:36 pm Post subject:
The "extensions" thing is nothing new either. It's nothing that people couldn't have done before, rather just another way of packaging UNO components. It's no "Firefox" revolution. The reason why Firefox has garnered so many "extensions" is because the combination of XUL plus JavaScript makes for an environment that is very easy for web developers to quickly code little frufrus (not to dismiss their utility). It's the same strategy that Apple's pursuing for Dashboard, and who knows, may push for the iPhone.
The extensions thing was a whole bunch of marketing hooey over something that, when it boils down to it, is nothing more than a glorified JAR file format. Just changing the file format does not make it any easier to "extend", write macros for, or fix bugs in OOo.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Mon Feb 26, 2007 1:06 am Post subject:
pluby wrote:
Granted, I have no idea what is going within Sun, the above is just my guess based on the fact that OOo is spinning new releases every 2 months yet there are no plans to add the one feature that most everyone is going to need in a very short time: suport for Office 2007 files.
As a followup to this: we have no intention of trying to keep up with this artifical release schedule. Schedules that mandate releases every fixed number of months are nothing but a machine used by marketing drones to fuel artifical demand. Corporate marketing departments are adept at executing this approach to the point of making software upgrades and support the primary revenue stream instead of ongoing sales (Quark? cough....not to name names....).
There's no point in making a new release unless you have something meaningful to release. If all you're doing is fixing bugs, then just issue a patch and be done with it. If it's good enough for Apple, it's good enough for me. Stop hyping your bugfixes like it's something that people should be thankful for and should pay for; it's something that you should provide free of charge as a patch or "dot upgrade" as a common courtesy to people who have been patient enough to continue to be users regardles of your mistakes.
Of course there is always a time when something is too old to be maintained and there is always an economic tradeoff. But for free software I'd like to think we've done fairly well thus far.
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My point was that as the scale of the project and the code has increased, the required development/shake-out time has had to increase (double), too, but I guess that wasn't clear in what I said 
