Changes to release schedule
Added 2018-05-16 10:49:00 +0000 UTCGood news everyone (hopefully)! I'll be changing how new Playnite versions are being developed and released. This is primarily based on how development on 3.0 and 4.0 progressed (not as well as I imagined). I identified theses issue about how things are done currently, basically all come from the fact that releases are too big:
- A lot of finished features wait for overall release even that they are ready to be released
- Big gaps between releases
- It's hard to test so many changes
- It's not motivating for me to have a big milestones
Solution is quite simple and obvious, smaller and more frequent releases. Current plan is to have new release every 2 or 3 weeks. I want to have one reasonably sized new feature and couple of bug fixes in each release.
I've already planned out couple of upcoming versions, the roadmap is:
- 4.3 - Rework updating to allow smaller update package sizes since we are going to release new versions more frequently.
- 4.4 - Improve metadata download and IGDB integration. One of the biggest feedback right now is inaccuracy in metadata download and requests for other metadata providers. This version will improve scrapping from IGDB and lay ground for other providers to be added in future.
- 4.5 - Rework in themming support and deploy web gallery for themes and extensions.
- 4.6 - Improve testing coverage with unit tests and integration tests. Playnite has a big technical debt related to lack of automated testing.
Complete list of features in each version can be found on GitHub. Releases are slightly bigger in scope for now because they are focused on laying ground for upcoming features. After that I'll schedule versions based on general feedback and polls from you patrons.
Since new releases are planned for every 2 or 3 weeks, it means that $5+ patrons will be one version ahead of public releases.
