Mozilla Tweaks The Firefox Release Schedule

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Tweaks The Firefox Release Schedule

For the past few years Mozilla has been on a solid six week cadence for shipping new Firefox releases while for the remainder of the releases in 2016 they are tweaking that schedule slightly...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...lease-Schedule

[bug77]

Firefox releases will now be on a variable six-to-eight week release cycle while still delivering the same number of releases each year. This ensures that there is at least six weeks for every release and the cycles are adjusted for emerging user/market needs.

I'm sorry, that can't be true. You can't have 6-8 weeks release cycles and the same number of releases in a year while also having at least 6 weeks between releases. If some cycle are longer, some have to be shorter than 6 weeks to compensate.
Also, I have no idea what "needs" are they talking about.

[Michael_S]

Also, I have no idea what "needs" are they talking about.

How about the need to get Servo production-ready and into the mainline? That's the need I care about.

[habilain]

I'm sorry, that can't be true. You can't have 6-8 weeks release cycles and the same number of releases in a year while also having at least 6 weeks between releases. If some cycle are longer, some have to be shorter than 6 weeks to compensate.

Knowing Mathematics, I just have to correct this. They certainly can have the same number of releases, even if it's a little counterintuitive. Basically, if you have a release every 6 weeks, then you get 8 releases per year, but with 4 weeks of slack (because 52 is not exactly divisible by 6). Obviously 8 and 2/3rds releases per year doesn't make sense, so it gets rounded down to 8 releases per year. And that means that as you have slack, you can allow varying the release date and have some of the releases take longer than 6 weeks and still manage 8 releases a year.

Now if you were to look at the number of releases over 3 years (as 156 is exactly divisible by 6), then you arrive at a different conclusion. Over three years there is no slack, and so a 6 week release schedule gives you 26 releases, which means that over a period of 3 years we will have 2 fewer releases on the new schedule (which has 8 releases per year).

So are they being truthful? I'd say so. As you can't have a fractional release per year, the number of releases per year remains the same. But it's also true that over a three year period, two releases have disappeared.

Blame trying to apply fractions to indivisible things for this.

[Daktyl198]

How about the need to get Servo production-ready and into the mainline? That's the need I care about.

It's getting there... if a little slowly. I wish more people worked on it :/

[bug77]

It's getting there... if a little slowly. I wish more people worked on it :/

Well, you kinda have to learn Rust to work on it, so...

[CrystalGamma]

Well, you kinda have to learn Rust to work on it, so...

I know Rust, but I can't be arsed to work on other people's projects if they're >10kloc, at least not without getting paid for it.
I have so many other hobbies that want my free time, I don't want to use that just to get a glimpse of how some huge codebase where my contributions won't make an impact works.
Sorry, I love seeing Servo evolve, and I love the language, but I have other things to do.

[randomizer]

...provide at least six working weeks for every release.

2016-12-13 – Firefox 50.0.1 (5 week cycle, release for critical fixes as needed)

Looks like they've planned to fail.

[Herem]

So are they being truthful? I'd say so. As you can't have a fractional release per year, the number of releases per year remains the same. But it's also true that over a three year period, two releases have disappeared.

Your logic is perfect if they allow no more than 4 additional weeks in any single calendar year. It isn't clear if that will be the case though.

As this change is to ensure stable releases, it seems unlikely they would allow unstable releases later in a year. Using your logic this would be the case if 4 weeks had already been used to fix earlier releases.

[Ferdinand]

So you have 6 weeks of nightly development time, 6 weeks of aurora development time, and 6 weeks of beta development time. And now that final period of 6 weeks sometimes needs to be 8 weeks? I don't get that. If something is not finished it stays in nightly.