Re: GRUB 1.90 is released

["Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@enbug.org>]

On Tuesday 09 August 2005 15:43, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> You mentioned you wanted to release something "in the beginning of
> August." There was no rush this weekend, and I think it would have been
> polite to give people time to fix the PPC build before releasing.

I'm sorry, but I must insist my own idea about this point.

The planning has been written in the wiki. It explicitly said that the date 
would be 2005-08-07.

Besides that, the next weekend is too late. Since I have very little time in 
weekdays, if I had given it up on the 7th, I would have to postpone till the 
13th or 14th. Do you think this is still "the beginning of August"? For me, 
it is the middle of August.

I don't think my action was impolite. Because you or anyone else didn't oppose 
to my proposal of making a release "regardless of the status", I assume that 
it was an approval. Am I wrong?

I'd like to describe why I stick to the scheduling. In GRUB Legacy, I was not 
a release manager at the beginning. Gordon was the official maintainer, and I 
simply assisted him. After that, I had to manage releases myself, but I 
couldn't realize the importance of making a release regularly and quickly, 
since I had no experience. I often missed release points, because I hesitated 
to do it when I felt that something was not working or missing. That affected 
the development badly, since many people kept using old versions and didn't 
try the latest. This is one reason why GRUB Legacy has never been a stable 
version.

That gave me a lesson that it is sometimes necessary to ignore negative things 
to obtain more benefits. I do not want to make the same mistake again in GRUB 
2. If you see successful projects (at the aspect of development), most of 
them make releases very often or regularly. If you see failing projects, most 
of them do not make releases very well. I don't think I need to list up 
examples here.

As long as GRUB 2 is at a developmental phase, I'd like to keep the policy of 
making releases regularly, regardless of the status. That's because I know 
that releases can be extremely delayed, once I accept to put a delay.

At the current stage, the purpose of releases is not to provide ready-to-use 
distributions, but to get more developers interested in GRUB 2, as Marco 
pointed out. If one does not try to look at the source code only because it 
is not compilable, he/she won't take part in the development anyway, so we 
don't have to care.

I hope you would understand my point.

Okuji