Hi, I am the developer of PdfDing. One thing I am not sure about is the frequency of my releases. What do you folks prefer in self-hosted projects? More releases in order to get new features as fast as possible or fewer releases with bigger feature additions?
Very good point about Agile.
As an end-user (that is, the IT staff that will be deploying/managing things), I prefer less-frequent releases. I’d love to see 1 or 2 releases a year for all software (pipe dream, I know). Once you have a handful of packages, you end up with constant change to manage.
I suspect what we end up with is early adopters embracing the frequent releases, and providing feedback/error reporting, while people like me benefit from them while choosing to upgrade less frequently.
There are about 3 apps that I’m a beta tester for, so even I’m part of that early-adopter group.
The hard floor for release frequency must always be “as security issues are fixed”, and those will rarely be infrequent in our current environment of ever-shifting dependencies.
If your environment is struggling to keep up with patching, you need to analyze that process and find out why it’s so arduous.
As an example, I took a shop from a completely manual patch slog 10 years ago to a 97% never-touch automated process. It was hard with approvals and routines, but the numbers backed me up. When I left 2 years ago, the humans had little to do beyond validation.
The sad news is, the great loss of mentors after Y2K will be seen again after RTO, and we’re not going to fix the fundamental problems that enable longer release cycles in a safe way; and so shorter update cadence will be our reality if we want to stay safe …
… and stay bleeding-edge. Shifting from feature-driven releases to only bugfix-driven releases means no churn for features, but that’s a different kind of rebasing. It’s the third leg of the shine-safe-slack pyramid; choose 2.