I understand that everyone is free to test new versions until he/she thinks that it is sufficiently stable for hes/her application.
I also understand that it would be unreasonable to assume that "stable" versions are completely trouble-free.
Still, there should be some procedure for marking as "stable" or "development" different versions.
May I ask what these procedures or criteria are?
thanks
Piersante
See Section 4 - Working with Branches - at http://moodle.org/doc/index.php?file=cvs.html#n4
That confirms my question, but doesn't give an answer...
cheers,
Piersante
cheers,
Piersante
Your question isn't an easy one. We use a release management strategy popular in FOSS projects using CVS -- Jon pointed to the page that explains this. This strategy is sometimes referred to "freeze & branch", all development happens on HEAD, until MD calls a "freeze" for a day or two (no new functionality, only fixes are allowed to be checked in). After the freeze a new branch is created (this allows developers working on features to commit them to HEAD).
On that branch more fixes happen until we consider it "ready". At this stage, there'll be alpha, beta and rc releases as the release manager and early adopters that if no new bugs are reported for a few days, you know that it's getting there. Fixes on the branch are also merged back into HEAD.
There's some literature covering these practices. Moodle's approach is close to the model followed by Apache and Mozilla.
Related links:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Papers/Open-Source-Research/OSSE3-Erenkrantz.pdf
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Proj-Mgmt-HOWTO/
http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Release-Practice-HOWTO/
On that branch more fixes happen until we consider it "ready". At this stage, there'll be alpha, beta and rc releases as the release manager and early adopters that if no new bugs are reported for a few days, you know that it's getting there. Fixes on the branch are also merged back into HEAD.
There's some literature covering these practices. Moodle's approach is close to the model followed by Apache and Mozilla.
Related links:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Papers/Open-Source-Research/OSSE3-Erenkrantz.pdf
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Proj-Mgmt-HOWTO/
http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Release-Practice-HOWTO/