Release Early, Release Often

@Mike wrote:

I’m currently running mt-daapd-svn-1315. I used to try and keep up with the nightlies, but not really any more, and the simple reason is that the svn count keeps going up, but stability doesn’t improve, because mt-daapd hasn’t crashed or had any bugs for me for ages now. At a certain point, I figured what’s the point of updating when it’s already working perfectly fine for me?

Wish you would take that sentiment to the roku forums… I’m busy getting beaten up over there. 🙂

It just seems that if stable releases were pushed out more often it might make it into some more distro’s, and I really do think mt-daapd is ready to be more widely used.

I’d make the argument that I’m not on a quest for market share, but to make a music server that I use. 🙂

But your point is well taken.

It’s not present in the ubuntu edgy eft repositories (unless I missed it), and this strikes me as silly. Ubuntu is trying to be the desktop distro of choice, and iTunes sharing is just the kind of feature that would seem like a great fit, especially since edgy was supposed to incorporate new technologies and be a more ‘fun’ distro for it.

Right now it is in debian unstable and testing, and will probably make the cut for Etch, which means it will probably show up in ubuntu at some point soon.

It’s in gentoo, (nightlies, too) and Diego does an amazing job of keeping up with it.

What’s hurt it most is the apple mdns stuff. If macosforge would come back up so I could get the bsd licenced mdns stuff, than I could add that and be free by DFSG terms, which would help a lot.

That would get it into SuSE, for example, as I’ve talked to some of the SuSE devs.

But I suspect lots of maintainers might look at the last stable being released back in March, and assume that the project is not very strong or active. They likely wouldn’t check to see that nightlies arrive with regularity and are in fact just as stable as any other open source project out there.

Yeah… I know what you are saying, it’s just that it’s *really* hard to roll a stable. Really hard.

I like waterfalling it a lot better. Expectations are lower. 🙂

As far as it goes, the 1359 release represents the stablest of the nightlies. I wouldn’t call it a stable release, but definately a not-unstable release.

There are some architecture fixes I want to do before I finish a stable. I need to redo the database stuff again, to abstract it better, and get the plugin format stable.

Then I’ll push for a stable. I actually expected it would only be a couple months past the 1359 release, but it’s taking me longer than I though… the iTunes 7 fiasco is keeping me really busy. I’m running out of time to actually code, spending too much time on the forums and email. :/

I’m not trying to pick a fight, I’m just a very happy mt-daapd user who doesn’t see why he’s still building from source, when it’s been rock solid for ages now. Clearly whatever development that is going on doesn’t seem to be impacting me, and therefor I’m not really being of much help, so give me a stable release and I’ll be on my way.

That’s part of the reason for all the new nightly formats (deb and rpm formats). That way it will be a lot easier for me to drop new stable builds. Once I do reach a new stable, I want to shorten my release cycles, so I don’t have a year and a half between releases again. That’s hard to maintain.

Again, thanks for doing such a bang up job on this. mt-daapd makes my day, and does so on a daily basis.

Glad to hear it, and I appreciate your kind words. Mostly I only hear from people for whom it’s broken. :/

I’m mostly on the same page as you are. I really do want to get something stable released… there are too many new features to keep it held back like this.

It pains me when someone comes on the forum and says they are running 0.2.4. Ugh. I really have to get sped up on this.