Hi Mathieu, you are right in that updating every half year is a lot of work, but the good thing is, that you don't have to. We have libraries that are still on 3.6.x now and we will probably update them directly to 3.12 sometime this year. The positive side on half year feature releases is that you can get to use your sponsored enhancements quicker if you want to. Libraries don't have to wait a full year worst case or even longer, if for whatever reason their developments can't go into the very next release. As it stands Koha changes a lot in short amounts of time. Our release notes show that quite well and I think we should keep our cycle. Translations are always a bit of a pain to do, that won't change with different tools or different kinds of releases in my opinion. But the bugfix releases don't introduce a lot of new strings. It's the big releases that do and I think we wouldn't reduce work with longer release cycles. Katrin Am 07.04.2013 10:27, schrieb Mathieu Saby:
Hello Maybe you will not agree with me, but here is my *personal *opinion about release rythm : 6 month between each "major" release seems quite a short delay. In France we have libraries using 3.10 (I think only my library for the moment), 3.8, probably 3.6, 3.2 (with a lot of local changes). In some monthes, we will have libraries using 3.12, 3.10, 3.8 etc
For a library a 6 month rythm means updating 2 times Koha each year. Before and after each change, you need to test the new version, to train colleagues, to update documentation, to signal new bugs to your vendor if you have one... You can do that if you have a big team, and the help of a vendor. This is not the case of all libraries... It is also a problem for internationalization : translation teams need to maintain projects for 3 or 4 versions. With Pootle, it is not possible (how many languages with 100% strings translated for 3.10, 3.8 and 3.6 ???). Even with an other system it will be very difficult and will take a lot of time. Finally, in terms of development : with the current system, we work on enhancements approximatly 4 months (before feature freeze) for each version. So 8 month in a year. With a rythm of a year, we could work for example 9 months on enhancements, and 3 on bugfixes and translations.
Regards, M. Saby Rennes 2 university