On: Mercurial: Onward and upward

[pbreit]

It seems to work OK but monthly releases for version control software scares the heck out of me.

[jordigh → pbreit]

Don't be scared. Mercurial is very conservative about what a new release can do. There are lots of rules, and they are treated very seriously:

http://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/CompatibilityRules

[TillE → pbreit]

I've had zero problems with Mercurial, including communicating with a server running a years-old version.

If you look through the changelogs, you'll find that it's mostly adding a lot of optional features, not frantically fixing bugs in the core.

[SwellJoe → pbreit]

So, you would prefer one big release every year with hundreds of changes?

I will take small, incremental improvements over massive upgrades always. If something goes wrong in a monthly release, the change log is short enough for me to read every item and probably figure it out in a few minutes.

I cannot think of any benefit to a slow release cycle with large changes bunched up into versions, and consider it a major negative when I am choosing software (I'm currently upgrading to Drupal 7 from 6 and its been almost funny how much of a disaster it's been).

There's a reason Chrome and Firefox and Manny others do rapid rolling releases. It simply delivers better software faster and with less likelihood of catastrophic problems. Small changesets are just easier to fit into a human mind.

[_random_ → pbreit]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery