[Development] Feature freeze date?

jason.mcdonald at nokia.com jason.mcdonald at nokia.com
Fri Dec 16 03:01:29 CET 2011


Having been release manager for several past Qt feature releases (4.5 to 4.7), I'm wary of setting a single feature freeze date and having a big rush to cram all the new features into the master branch in the last couple of days before the deadline.  Instead, I would like to see a staggered delivery of features, where each large change is tested, merged and tested some more before the gate is opened for the next big change.

For the Qt 4.5.0 and 4.6.0 releases, we did the former, and in both cases the last minute rush to push in all the new features caused substantial breakage and significantly delayed the alpha and beta releases.  For Qt 4.6, it took two weeks after the feature freeze date to get the branch compiling again on all the Tier 1 platforms (that was the criteria for an alpha release) and several months to satisfy the (fairly lax) quality criteria for a beta release.

For the Qt 4.7.0 release, we staggered the merging of new features over several weeks and had a much better result, with alpha release packages building successfully on the day after the feature freeze.

--
Jason McDonald
QTestLib Maintainer


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