From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-03-20T18:17:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Frequency of announcements

On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 09:15:23AM +0900, Lyle Johnson wrote:
> Josef,
> 
> You are *not* sending too many announcements to the list. Perhaps the 
> person who sent you the mail was just feeling constipated and needed to 
> take it out on someone.

It was me. I was not intending to cause any offence, and it was just a
suggestion made privately, but I will take more roughage if it will help :-)

Release often? - absolutely.
Announce globally every time you release? - I'm not sure, especially in a
phase of heavy development where new releases are thick and fast.

To take an extreme case: if I were to release a package daily, and it's of
minority interest in relation to the set of people I am announcing to,
should I make a global announcement every time?

I would argue that the first announcement would raise awareness of the
package's existence, and someone who is using it is likely to be monitoring
it in the RAA (which has a 'recent changes' section anyway), and/or its
homepage, and/or a separate mailing list more specifically targetted to its
users.

If you don't announce every time though, then that leaves an entirely
subjective judgement as to what consistutes a "major release".

I admit I was being a bit too pre-emptive on this one. But I do notice lots
of updates appearing in RAA which don't get announced on ruby-talk. Are they
of any less interest? If they were all announced here, wouldn't it be
tiresome?

Regards,

Brian.