I've been uncomfortable with the amount of features I perceive are going into our maintenance releases for a while now. I thought it would stop after we committed ourselves to having a more predictable major release schedule. But getting 0.7.1 out feels like it's taken a lot more effort than it should have. I wonder if part of the problem is that we've been committing destabilizing features into it? IMO, maintenance releases (0.7.1, 0.7.2, etc.) should only contain bug fixes and *carefully* vetted features.
I've scanned down the list of 0.7.1 changes in CHANGES.txt and about half of them are features that I think could have stayed in trunk. I think we did this a lot with the early maintenance releases of 0.6 as well, probably in an effort to get features out *now* instead of waiting for an 0.7 that was not happening soon enough. We've decided to pick up the pace of our major release schedule (sticking to four months). I think maintaining this pace will be difficult if we continue to commit as many features into the minor releases as we have been. I'm willing to concede that I may have an abnormally conservative opinion about this. But I wanted to voice my concern in hopes we can improve the quality and delivery of our maintenance releases. Gary.
