Until I released QSF 1.2.5 the other day, I'd forgotten one of the reasons I don't subscribe to the motto "release early, release often" - it's a pain in the arse. SourceForge
really don't make it easy to release projects with multiple files, and
they've also managed to hose the Compile Farm again so I can't produce
anything other than Fedora Core 6 i386 binaries.
The other reason I don't follow The Great Prophet ESR is because I dislike wasting my time. Far too often I have looked for a package to do a particular job and ended up installing seven different half-finished pieces of complete garbage, none of which work, or have installed something that works one week and then, on upgrading to fix its many bugs, fails the next. Since the general philosophy of "be excellent to each other" implies that one should not do to others what you don't like having done to you, I would rather at least attempt to run some tests on my code before dumping it on the Internet, so as to not waste the time of users with buggy releases. Whether those tests work or not is another matter, but at least I give it a shot.
Then there's the co-operative development aspect. None of the projects I have ever worked on have particularly attracted other developers. I've had the odd bit of feedback, even the occasional patch, and have a couple of people managing Debian ports for some of my projects, for which I'm grateful - but I'm the only person making major changes to the codebase. I'm happy with this - it suits my temperament - but since "release often" is geared towards getting feedback and development, without developers or many users (and project mailing lists infested with tumbleweeds), it's a bit pointless in my case.
The other reason I don't follow The Great Prophet ESR is because I dislike wasting my time. Far too often I have looked for a package to do a particular job and ended up installing seven different half-finished pieces of complete garbage, none of which work, or have installed something that works one week and then, on upgrading to fix its many bugs, fails the next. Since the general philosophy of "be excellent to each other" implies that one should not do to others what you don't like having done to you, I would rather at least attempt to run some tests on my code before dumping it on the Internet, so as to not waste the time of users with buggy releases. Whether those tests work or not is another matter, but at least I give it a shot.
Then there's the co-operative development aspect. None of the projects I have ever worked on have particularly attracted other developers. I've had the odd bit of feedback, even the occasional patch, and have a couple of people managing Debian ports for some of my projects, for which I'm grateful - but I'm the only person making major changes to the codebase. I'm happy with this - it suits my temperament - but since "release often" is geared towards getting feedback and development, without developers or many users (and project mailing lists infested with tumbleweeds), it's a bit pointless in my case.
