[Building Sakai] Change the Sakai CLE release date policy ?

[Sam Ottenhoff]

>
>
> The LMS Transition Initiative
> http://wheel.ucdavis.edu/lms/
> extract :
> "Frequency of Updates. Sakai has not had significant updates in years
> (only bug fixes), and the fixes that do occur are annual, which is not
> frequently enough. The LMS candidates that we are investigating update
> tools, add functionality, and address bugs much more frequently."
>


The person from UCDavis writing this blog post has a poor understanding of
the way Sakai is updated and is most likely referring to their local
institution's release of Sakai as opposed to the global updating of Sakai.
 Sakai code is updated every day of the year, and after the QA team
verifies issues, the fixes are merged into maintenance branches on a weekly
basis.  I would argue that critical bugs are addressed quite quickly in the
community, and institutions that are interested in rolling out bug fixes
should be rolling out patches several times every term.




>
> When you take a look at all official releases of Sakai CLE web page (that
> I have created), grouped by branch in reverse chronological order:
> Sakai Release Date list
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Sakai+Release+Date+list
> you can see that users neeed to wait 3 months for a minor release (2.9.x)
> and 10 months between a major release (from 2.9.3 to 2.10.0)



You are mis-understanding the way maintenance branches work.  The
maintenance branch (2.9.x, 10.x) is updated frequently as issues are
verified by our QA team.  Institutions that want frequent bug fixes should
use the maintenance branches.  Institutions that want less-frequent updates
can use official tags or releases (2.9.3, 10.0, 10.1).  There is no need to
wait for official releases if you are interested in frequent updates.


> Is it possible to have a minor release every two months to fix the bugs,
> to have minor improvements and to have the latest translations ?


If you want frequent updates, use the maintenance branches and don't wait
for official releases.  An official release is simply a group of volunteers
coming together to verify, QA, and package the maintenance branch code.  If
you want to help increase our velocity of maintenance branch fixes, our QA
team could use more volunteers to verify issues that have been fixed in
trunk but are waiting for verification before being merged to the
maintenance branch.

--Sam
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