Tech Forum

Why are updates announced without a clear idea of when it will be released? I understand that things happen and delay a release, but couldn't the notice wait for distribution until the update is actually locked down and announced in the form of "the update will come down one week from today"?

Maybe it's to acknowledge that the existence of a bug is known and a fix is on its way?

aclawson wrote:Why are updates announced without a clear idea of when it will be released? I understand that things happen and delay a release, but couldn't the notice wait for distribution until the update is actually locked down and announced in the form of "the update will come down one week from today"?

I cannot answer your question but I think that when an update is actually locked down it is sent very quickly after that, not a week later.

aclawson wrote:Why are updates announced without a clear idea of when it will be released? I understand that things happen and delay a release, but couldn't the notice wait for distribution until the update is actually locked down and announced in the form of "the update will come down one week from today"?

Updates are announced early in the beta cycle since some units get updates as part of the beta as it expands. The beta cycle typically takes about a month, so you can use that and the announcement date to estimate a release date.

Here is how things are progressing for MLS 3.7.0.

Beta 1 ("Friends and Family") was released on January 16. This beta went to eight units, all of which are associated with the development team. My ward gets it, the product manager's ward and stake get it, etc. If something goes wrong, it's easier to address if the issues are close to home.

Beta 2 ("Expanded") was released to 206 additional units on January 24. The release announcement also went out on January 24. Beta 3 went to 922 additional units (total of 1136 units) on January 31 and has been expanded to a total of 3341 units to get some changes related to another system into production. Since some units saw an update on January 24, the notice went out early enough that they would get the notice when they started getting updates.

Open beta typically coincides with or comes shortly after beta 3 and the installer is available on RKATS at that point. In this case, open beta will start "Real Soon Now." Since the MLS release notes on RKATS give a date, I'm comfortable with saying that the production release is scheduled for February 21.

There was a thread in September describing the process for MLS 3.6.1.

You may understand that things happen and delay a release, but that isn't the case for everyone. I stopped giving release dates years ago after an incident where I mentioned (in a forum, no less) that a release was expected on a specific date (two days out). There was a message on the forum at 6:00 AM with someone ranting that the release date had come and demanding to know why it wasn't available. That was three hours before the office opened. The release went out about 2:00 PM.

We released an additional beta for MLS 3.7.0 today and the latest installer is available on RKATS at http://lds.org/mls-download. We have postponed the final release date one week (to February 28) to allow some additional time for translations to come back on the new quarterly report.

scgallafent wrote:You may understand that things happen and delay a release, but that isn't the case for everyone. I stopped giving release dates years ago after an incident where I mentioned (in a forum, no less) that a release was expected on a specific date (two days out). There was a message on the forum at 6:00 AM with someone ranting that the release date had come and demanding to know why it wasn't available. That was three hours before the office opened. The release went out about 2:00 PM.

Well, I hope this isn't the way all decisions are made at CHQ - As I'm annoyed personally, I'll communicate with my support org. And yes, we, effectively, are an extension of a team supporting the MLS solution (and many others out there), we're just not paid for the work we do.

johnshaw wrote:Well, I hope this isn't the way all decisions are made at CHQ - As I'm annoyed personally, I'll communicate with my support org. And yes, we, effectively, are an extension of a team supporting the MLS solution (and many others out there), we're just not paid for the work we do.

Nope. That doesn't have anything at all to do with how decisions are made. It is just my personal reason for rarely giving release dates. In the case of MLS release dates, the anticipated dates are set fairly early. I'm not the one who decides when those dates are announced.