@stangri and @jow were discussing the evolution of LEDE in What should we call the current builds? - #67 by jow)
I have renamed this discussion and brought it into the Developer category of the forum.
stangri:
So what's the next feature driving the next release of OpenWrt/LEDE?jow:
I don't think there's any killer feature driving the progress of the entire project. Development currently is mainly driven by external contributions (device support patches, bug fixes) and polishing/extending/fixing existing sub systems as well as overall performance improvements.stangri:
Whatever the project, unless it's feature complete, there's always a feature which can define the release criteria for the next milestone (or two).jow:
I can't think of any suitable one. Here's some example:
- Device tree support for ar71xx? That is months to years away and would delay the release forever.
- Kernel 4.9? That will invalidate all stabilization work invested into the tree so far.
- New device? New devices are added one to two times per week so on which one should we wait and why only on that and not others?
- Bug count below 50 ? Various issues in the tracker are eternal bugs which are unlikely to be fixed within a foreseeable time frame.
To return the question what exactly would you define as a release criteria?
So far you seem to worry about new devices first but given that releases happen every two to three months, is there an actual problem? In the worst case, a new device is added shortly after a release which would imply a maximum waiting time of two to three months until the next release branch is started. But even in this situation there is nothing preventing us from cherry picking the device support patches into the current release branch and make an YY.MM.N+1 point release within a day.
stangri:
Wasn't having infrastructure in place to support first LEDE release one of the first goals of the fork? Wouldn't then having all infrastructure in place for the release warrant a first release? Is infrastructure in place now?jow:
The hardware is in place, the release setup is doing build testing since a few days.
It seems to me that this is a good first step toward criteria that lead to our first release. I see these important points:
- Current builds are pretty stable
- No killer features are outstanding. (There are plenty of enhancements in the wings that can be incorporated in the future, but they're not holding up a release.)
- Build system is in place, although only in early testing phase
Is this enough? Could we declare the current feature set (more or less) to be sufficient for our first release?