[Development] On the effectiveness of time based releases

Thiago Macieira thiago.macieira at intel.com
Mon Feb 24 19:22:07 CET 2014


Em seg 24 fev 2014, às 19:00:28, Frederik Gladhorn escreveu:
> > Some of those features then either caused regressions (... ok,
> > that's what betas are for, although it may also be a symptom of poor
> > testing in order to get the feature in), or are highly debatable
> > from an API / technical point of view (which is even worse, because
> > we can't change APIs or behaviour once we release).
> 
> Yes, I feel we haven't reviewed new public API in a sensible way. Any 
> suggestions how to make this work? In the Nokia days (and earlier of
> course)  there were long long sessions discussing API and perfecting it. In
> a sense it's really hard to achieve the same over IRC and mail, but maybe
> we should come up with a better way of dealing with this.

I agree with the rest of what Frederik said, so I'm deleting it and focusing 
on the part above: API reviews.

>From our release guidelines, "alpha" means we're releasing something for which 
the functionality will be reviewed. So API reviews done before an Alpha are to 
guarantee minimum alignment with Qt API guidelines. I've done several of those 
and I've seen others do the same, so it seems like we are doing it.

However, since the point of an Alpha is to gather feedback on the 
functionality and API, it's not frozen in time. There's a lot of opportunity 
left to review it and modify the API. So a second round of comprehensive API 
review on any new things should be done after the alpha.

Of course, this all depends on the size and complexity of the API. For smaller 
things, there probably won't be any controversy. For bigger things, 
stakeholder input is required even before merging into dev -- that was the 
case, for example, for QFileSelector.

Finally, note that alpha is not a review of the *implementation*. That's what 
the beta is for. But even if that is done at the beta release, we still need 
to have good implementations. Sloppy code won't be accepted. So why can't we 
do the same for the API?

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center




More information about the Development mailing list