On Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:56:42 -0700, Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> wrote: > Frankly, I wouldn't mind doing strict time-based releases with something > like the following: Hi, Carl. I think this is a fine idea, and we (not you) can definitely run this process. I'm quite sure that at least bremner and I can completely handle this together, and I'm sure we can get others to help. But the mechanics of the actual release are not the problem. The problem is the current one-person bottleneck for all patches: your review and merge of all patches into the notmuch/master branch. This would not necessarily be a problem if you could get to reviewing and merging patches more frequently. But as it is now, if there are no new patches on notmuch/master for longer than the release period, there will be nothing to package and upload. This is *not* meant to be an indictment of you at all. I know it's incredibly hard to keep up with the incoming patch flow. It takes a lot of time and work to review every patch. I also really like your reviews. They are incredibly thorough and insightful, and I always learn from them. Your intimate knowledge of the code base also means that you can frequently come up with cleaner solutions to the proposed patches (as with the reworked part handling). However, the bottleneck presents a big problem when delays are introduced. We can't really do anything until you can get to the review. Furthermore, even if we do push ahead to put together a release candidate branch (as we did with 0.6), if your review severely alters patches early in that branch we have to do a lot of work to rework their decedents (as we did with 0.6). This leads to a lot of inefficiencies. So we need to figure out a way to break the bottleneck. I would really like to continue to get your review of patches. I think they're just too valuable. So it would be really nice if one of the solutions was a way to just "grease" the bottleneck, so to speak. For instance, if you could commit to reviewing just 1 patch series a week we would be way ahead of where we have been. Another thing that would help would be to delegate responsibility of certain components to others, as you have with the python binding to spaetz. For instance, we have at least a couple of elisp experts hanging around. Maybe you could cede handling of all emacs patches to someone like jkr or dme, and to felipe for vim, etc. (if they're willing to take on those rolls). That would help reduce your burden a bit. We could also formalize some sort of tiered review system. amdragon has been doing a really good job of frequently providing good review of patches on list. I think that any proposed patch that gets a thumbs up From someone like amdragon should immediately be elevated in your queue, or just applied out-right. If the review of others explicitly helped get patches merged faster, I'm quite sure it would encourage more folks to submit their reviews as well. I would love to hear any other ideas people have on this front. Notmuch is an incredible project, with an absolutely incredible development community. It's an absolute joy to work on. If we can just grease the wheels a little bit to get releases out the door a little quicker, I think we'll all be a lot happier. jamie.