[development] Slow down with the official releases of contrib already, ok? ; )

[Derek Wright]

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.