Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up

[Marc Espie <espie at schutzenberger dot liafa dot jussieu dot fr>]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 09:48:33AM -0400, dewar@gnat.com wrote:
> But I certainly agree it is reasonable to aim at a 6-month schedule for GCC
> (I must say that it is awfully easy to miss such a goal, so it is quite
> likely in practice that aiming for a 6-month schedule means achieving a
> 12-month schedule, which is about what we manage in practice with the
> official releases of GNAT [though we do provide fully tested and qualified
> intermediate releases almost on a day by day basis to customers needing
> this kind of assistance].

In OpenBSD, we do manage six months release schedule. The way it works
is simple: we do releases every six months. Everything that is not stable
when release time gets near gets cut off. Our leader bitches, curses at
anyone who commits unstable code near release time instead of working
on fixing the release. It's just a question of habit: pretty soon, you
get a clue, and start working with the release. Also, when you have a
guarantee that you WILL have a six months release schedule, trying to
wedge that last improvement in  loses some of its attraction. You know
that you will be able to do it for the next release, which is only six
months away...