10 Months From Maven 2.0.4 to 2.0.5. What’s Wrong With That Picture?
Maven 2.0.4: released April 11, 2006
Maven 2.0.5: released February 14, 2007.
I’m really glad Maven 2.0.5 is out, it fixes quite a number of important issues (along with some more more minor stuff and enhancements). But for a tool which should be one of the key enablers of an agile and frequent release process, something seems broken somewhere if it takes 10 months to put out a point release when there are enough issues of this magnitude.
Of course, Maven is mostly built by volunteers, with limited resources. Should it be held to a different (less than ideal) standard because of this? I don’t think so. There first of all seems to be a decent amount of developer activity, but even in the face of more work than time/people to do it, I would argue the project (like any software development activity) when working on bugs and requirements needs to triage the list of things that are worked on, and focus on a regular and more frequent release process. Anything else is ultimately damaging to people’s confidence in using Maven… It’s interesting that on the dev list, as far back as Nov. 2006 there was a thread asking for the release of 2.0.5, with mention of user frustration after no release in more than 5 months, with many serious issues fixed. Bad enough; how did that become 10 months?
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