Fun fact: there are over 1000 commits to the Mastodon code base made between version 4.1 and the forthcoming version 4.2, even more when you look at “boring” things like dependency updates.
The core team doesn’t talk about the good work they have been doing anywhere nearly enough. They’re not all massive and impressive features but a lot of groundwork laid for future change.
Our members already see it, but there’s a lot that will be better once all Mastodon instances get to update soon
@vmstan@chucker not to disparage the work that they’re doing (quite the opposite in fact), but this seems like a not-great release process for a widely used project that’s increasingly in the public spotlight. A more rapid tempo of smaller releases, combined with regular status updates on the major roadmap items, would probably make everyone including the developers happier.
@memory@vmstan I’m not sure a faster cycle buys you much. Big features often take a lot of debate and design work — for example, editing took a while, but the end result was a feature designed fairly well from the get-go.
@chucker@vmstan I think there’s a happy medium to be found here: big features shouldn’t block regular updates, and the opacity of progress on contentious ones like quote-posting just encourages uncharitable speculation in a vacuum.
(It would also be nice if “Eugen personally finds your tone pleasant” were not a de facto requirement for landing major PRs, ahem.)
>I think there’s a happy medium to be found here: big features shouldn’t block regular updates, and the opacity of progress on contentious ones like quote-posting just encourages uncharitable speculation in a vacuum.
I mean, I can see that, but both of those ultimately mean more work. Either in terms of overhead for individual releases, or in terms of more communication.
4.1.0 Feb ’23
4.0.0 Nov ’22
3.5.0 Mar ’22
3.4.0 May ’21
3.3.0 Dec ’20
3.2.0 Jul ’20
3.1.0 Feb ’20
That gap from 3.4 to 3.5 was long… maybe they were busy preparing 4.0? But other than that, that’s two to three feature releases a year. Seems OK to me. I personally find Chrome’s and Firefox’s “must have a release every six weeks” silly. I also find it hard to keep up with new significant features that way.
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