IMO, we now have tools (Hudson) to guarantee a good quality for
integration build and putting us on the way to rolling release and
continuous delivery.
For SWTBot, I have to admit that making a release is just a
"marketing" effort in order to make some blog posts and tweets,
because of its good test suite, any snapshot which has tests working
is better than the last release. It's actually a continuous delivery
on the snapshots, and I've already recommended people to use
snapshots many times because it's better than previous release and I
don't have time to spend on the release right now. Basically, almost
every snapshot could become a release when you can trust your test
suite.
Allowing project to have rolling-release/continuous-delivery was
something Andrew already mentioned on the CBI mailing-list, and I
think it's a good way to go for some projects. It's all the more
true when projects don't have a schedule or a roadmap because
they're community-driven, and change when community wants it to
change.
When it comes to "release train", we should understand that as a
quality label which is given once a year: being part of release
train means that the version of your project you submit does conform
to release train requirements/level of quality. It should not (and
AFAI Understand, it does not) enforce a schedule for any project: a
project that wants 3 releases in one year can do it, and project
that did not have a release in previous year can resubmit an older
version to release train.
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