So I have a crazy idea I either need to be talked out of or convinced it’s not crazy… After alpha 3 on Wednesday I want move to monthly releases on the last Thursday of the month.
There’s a number of reasons for this…
- I’ve noticed with the 3 month cycle that there’s a lot of hype right after and right before releases. Which means there’s a solid 2 months in there of bleh when it comes to development and everything else.
- The release process isn’t super tedious, but doing it infrequently makes it harder to get it right. A good example of this is me taking 10 times to remember the password to my signing key.
- It’s now been 9 months since we declared the application stable enough for third party protocol developers and making them wait 3 months for updates to bugs and issues they’ve found is too long.
- Attempting to “plan” 3 months out is hard. It’d be much easier to say “I’m focusing on these few things for the next month”. This is basically the agile argument.
- We absolutely have to get the momentum rolling here. Debian drops GTK 2 in Debian 14 (Forky) next summer but will freeze much sooner. Homebrew is dropping GTK2 on 2027-08-28 (something like that I didn’t verify). Others have already dropped it. If we don’t have Pidgin 3 usable enough for users at that point we’re going to be in a support nightmare of people trying to compile pidgin 2 or 3 and I personally don’t want to deal with that.
Unless convinced otherwise, I’m going to announce the move to monthly releases in the Alpha 3 release announcement.