I think I'm more offended by update status in core, than people creating releases. :) All I ever wanted from the release system was a way to branch and version my code. I'd be really happy to see update_status disabled in core by default or be made less noisy ie) only make noise on sec update... Frankly contrib dev is noisy, and I don't see that changing. On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 12:58 PM, Derek Wright <drupal@dwwright.net> wrote:
I've noticed quite a few projects that seem to think the best time to make a new official release is after every CVS commit. While I'm happy to see people actually making official releases, please don't do this. ;)
A) Constant stream of noise for your users thinking they have to keep upgrading all the time (via update_status, etc).
B) Wasteful of resources (burns up diskspace on d.o for all the tarballs, bandwidth for all the downloads, etc).
C) Wasteful of RAM for sites using one of your modules with update_status (update_status needs to download and parse an XML file describing the history of all your module's releases -- as the # of modules on a site grows, and as the number of releases of your module for a given version of core grows, the RAM consumption starts to go through the roof -- see http://drupal.org/node/238950).
D) A new tarball after every CVS commit is exactly what the automatically re-generated development snapshot releases are for: http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs/releases/types#snapshot
Please don't cry wolf. Only make a new official release when it's really worth it for everyone to upgrade.
Thanks, -Derek (dww)
p.s. Learn about this and other best practices for release management by reading the very concise 2 page handout about the topic I gave out at my talk at the Boston DrupalCon: http://drupal.org/files/maintain-release-handout.pdf
p.p.s. If anyone wants to help fix update(_status)?.module to be less RAM hungry, please join us over at http://drupal.org/node/238950.