Establish a regular alpha release schedule

[joshuatbrown]

As of this writing, the latest alpha release was January 8, 2024, and now it's March 1, 2024. I'd love to know how often alpha releases are planned so I can know what to expect as a sponsor.

[austincondiff]

We appreciate your sponsorship and we do have a release planned for tomorrow, March 3, 2024, if not early this next week. We are waiting on one more piece of work that is in progress. We are pre-alpha at this point in time. We jumped the gun on putting the alpha label on our releases and have a new naming convention prepared for upcoming release that falls more in line with sem-ver standards. We are also planning a better milestone-led development cycle. Hopefully that answers your question. Please let us know if you have any others or have any thoughts or ideas as to how we might further improve this project!

[austincondiff]

Working on it now. We ran into a few snags (nothing major). This might push it back a few days. Looking forward to it as well and can't wait to release!

[joshuatbrown]

@austincondiff any updates on this? And if there's a different place I should be looking for updates, please direct me there.

[austincondiff]

I am still waiting on a few PR's to get submitted/approved around our new release process. It should be soon. You can look at our whats new page or the releases page on GitHub.

[austincondiff]

Just as a heads up, we just released!

[joshuatbrown]

@austincondiff thanks! Excited to try out the new Find feature!

[matthijseikelenboom]

I'm gonna chime in, trying to do some expectation management.

Releases will be irregular for the foreseeable future. This is simply because we are not a proper organization with employed people working on this. Everybody is working in their free time and has a full time job or study besides this. So of course, we can not "force" and tell people what and when they should develop, they are allowed to decide that for themselves. This results in unpredictable velocity for the project. Therefore a time based release schedule doesn't really makes much sense.

Like Austin said, the plan is to try out a milestone based release schedule. We would prioritize the issues that we have and attach them to a milestone. When all the issues are closed/completed, it completes the milestone and a new release would be published.

A side note is that the idea is easier said than done. Contributors are still free to decide what and when to develop, so if issues get picked up that are not part of the milestone, they should be linked to the milestone that is currently in progress. This automatically leads to scope creep in the milestone and it takes extra time from the maintainers to do PR reviews. Time that they might could've put to use to work on the issues from the milestone.
Next to that, to prioritize the issues, the maintainers likely need more meetings on a weekly basis, mainly because communication is more effective than chat messages.