[m-dev.] Re: 0.10 binary distributions

[Fergus Henderson]

On 21-Feb-2001, Peter Ross <peter.ross at miscrit.be> wrote:
> I just checked in the changes for fact table support under windows on
> the release branch.
> 
> I think they should be supported in 0.10.

That is not possible, since 0.10 has already been frozen, tagged,
tarred up, and released on our ftp site.  Even though it has not been
officially announced, it has already got as far as Sweden, on our ftp
mirror site.  It would be a bad idea to release another, different
release with the same name, since that could cause unfortunate
confusion.

We could decide that 0.10 was too buggy to ever officially announce
it, and instead only announce 0.10.1.  But I don't consider that
problem with fact tables on Windows to be a release-critical bug.  For
starters, it is not a regression.  Fact tables have never worked on
Windows previously.  In fact the implementation was never intended to
work on Windows.  It's nice that you have made it work on Windows
(with Cygwin), but the time for adding new features into 0.10 was long
before Christmas.

I've been warning people that a release was imminent for months now.
If we hold up the release any time there is some minor problem, then
it will never get released, because people will always be discovering
new problems.  I guarantee that some problems will be discovered only
after we release, no matter when that is!

For bugs which are not release-critical, we should document them on
the web site, and fix them on the release branch.  We've discovered
a few bugs since 0.10, so there will be a 0.10.1 eventually.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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