[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Releases

[Diego Biurrun]

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 11:15:41PM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> [...]

Since I have a hunch that the 0.5.2 release somehow triggered this
outburst, I'd like to clarify how it came about:

Reinhard and I had planned to make a quick point release for a long
time, but it had gotten delayed for various reasons.  In the meantime
Reinhard had accumulated a half dozen patches in his distro packages.

At some point I just picked up the ball again and suggested to Reinhard
that we could quickly put out the point release.  We have a bit of
experience now and we can do it quickly.  It took us an afternoon.

That's an amount of time that we can invest quickly without thinking
about it.  A full-blown release like 0.5 takes days and 0.6 has already
been at least an order of magnitude more work.

In exchange for 0.5.2 Reinhard gets the warm fuzzy feeling to not carry
around any patches that are not upstreamed and other distros can pick
them up quickly without further hassle.

Does that help people that are looking for the latest and greatest?
No, but it was never intended to.

Was it worth an afternoon's work?  Yes.

Diego