Bug fix releases

S4-John

This topic was started on FOSSBilling GitHub Discussions, and was moved to this forum on 17/03/2023. Original post authors and dates are preserved.

BradBot1 Mar 16, 2023

Since this product is undergoing massive changes it has a lot of bug fixes and new features that are implemented a more frequent release schedule would provide a more stable experience and enable testing. Something like 0.3.x would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not advocating for constant releases but it would be great for smaller changes that fix functionality (such as #895) to be useable sooner.

TL;DR: have bug fix releases occur more frequently rather than only delivering them with minor releases.

S4-John

I think that the releases are pretty frequent at the moment, and recently it is never much more than a few weeks to wait between them. Also if you look at December and January then there were a number of hotfix releases which were made to address urgent issues.

So, I don't think that we need to make them much more frequent or make too many small releases at the moment, but as the software matures a bit and there are longer gaps between bigger releases then yes, smaller bug fix releases will be more useful.

BelleNottelling

If there's some kind of urgent issue, we have no issue making a bug fix release, but in this case the issue mentioned was only brought up by two people so it's just not an urgent issue.

Practically speaking, as FOSSBilling matures and becomes more stable, releases will likely become less frequent as the focus shifts from fixing bugs and refactoring old code and instead to improving what's already there and adding new features.

Right now, we are still fairly early in the bug fixing stage, as despite having well over a 1k commits since forking from BoxBilling, there is still a lot of old code that has gone mostly untouched since BoxBilling and still suffers from bugs and poor quality.

Not to mention, we are still below version 1.0.0, which is where we will consider FOSSBilling to be production ready, and at that point we will likely have both "beta" and "stable" release branches, and make beta releases a few weeks before we make "stable" releases, so people can easily test for newly introduced bugs before an update goes live.