This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml , or @phiresky@lemmy.ml about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
There was a big time gap between 0.18.5 and 0.19. Have you considered adopting a release train model, similar to what Rust does? The Bevy game engine has also adopted the idea.
More frequent but smaller releases would probably cause less friction and make upgrading less of a “big thing” and “big things” are always things go wrong.
I would argue the Chrome style release model aka rushing for version numbers is what created the developmental mess in tech industry. It demands unnecessary effort and creates a lot of stress, and is a huge symptom of the capitalist market disease. There is no innovation in chasing new version numbers.
They normally do have smaller releases (18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, 18.5) but going from 18 to 19 was a big update that also required a database upgrade. Rust releases don’t have database upgrades or anything that is not backwards compatible, so it’s not really comparable.
0.19 was a bit of a special case because there was a set of breaking updates that had to be done at some point, and trickle releasing breaking changes isn’t really great either. Usually hopefully the breaking changes are rare, so releases can be more frequent.