Ask HN: Is there any point in doing periodic releases for apps anymore?

1 points by manishjhawar 6 years ago | 1 comment

Upon reading the recent Mozilla Developer Newsletter "Firefox 72 — our first song of 2020" [1]:

> [..] Now that we’ve moved to a 4-week browser release cycle, you’ll see fewer new features in each individual release, but features will be added to Firefox more often. This gives you faster access to new functionality and bug fixes. [..]

I wondered why do we even bother with periodic point releases at all. Why don't we just do feature releases. that is, push a release out as soon as a feature is ready. Maybe even for each bug-fix.

For backend systems, I get that there may be upgrade/migration and related concerns. But with frontend user apps, it's mostly just a reinstall/restart/reload for most users. Even that can be automated and made transparent for users like on mobiles.

The point being, other than tradition/culture, why keep ready features and bug-fixes waiting.

Also, now that we're already doing continuous integration and delivery, there does not seem to be any technical reason other than cultural.

Or am I missing something? Thoughts?

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/firefox-72-our-first-song-of-2020/

bzbarsky 6 years ago |

Typically there is a time between "pushed to development branch" and "shipped to users" when features and bugfixes go through QA and testing by both full-time testers and volunteer beta-testers. That's a large part of the reason they are not pushed to users immediately.