Blogging Roller

Linda's written up a summary of her smaller-is-better web application release philosophy and Roller fans take note, one of the projects she manages is blogs.sun.com. That's right folks, we're rolling out new blogs.sun.com releases on a monthly basis. Coming from a software product background, monthly releases seemed crazy to me, but Linda (and Will) have beaten me in to submission.

So, monthly releases are good for blogs.sun.com, which is a website, but do they make sense for Roller, which is a product? Sun can't force Roller to make monthly releases, since it's an external and independent project, but should the Roller team try to align with the blogs.sun.com release schedule? Is a monthly release too much for an open source web application like Roller? What if Sun was shipping a jazzed-up version of Roller, would Sun want to ship that once a month?

I'm thinking monthly releases a too much for a product like Roller, but I could be convinced otherwise. What do you think?

Raible: If you're hosting your open source project at java.net, you might be annoyed by the fact that you can't disable the forums or issue tracker. The forums pretty much suck, mainly because there's no "remember me" on the site and it's a pain to click 3 times just to answer someone's question. They also don't have the ability to quote a previous message. In addition to the less-than-adequate forums, the issue tracker doesn't hold a candle to JIRA.

For the longest time, I've been wanting to remove both the "Discussion forums" and "Project issues" links from the AppFuse homepage. I asked the java.net folks, and they didn't have a solution. Finally, I thought of one on my own.

Matt offers some constructive critcism of java.net (and by extension CollabNet).