Those people will simply quietly leave and start using an inferior-but-free product if they are even modestly unhappy with a release.

also the whole "with a GUI" is just hand-wavy cop-out bullshit

a GUI doesn't prevent anything described

The GUI is the interface

Like an API interface

requires thoughtfully planned releases and notification to users

that's a product and business decision, not a technical one

If you look at all of google's APIs, they are VERY careful about how they version them

And testing that cannot be done exclusively by engineers.

nothing prevents constantly shipping behind feature flags

They release new versions of their interfaces only every few years

who is they? you mean the company shipping an IDE that I update every other week?

No I mean google

Inbox changes all the time!

i don't care to argue

but you're both wrong!

Wait what am I wrong about?

Everything you say that Jake doesn’t agree with

Fair enough

I don't want to get personal here. We can probably just agree to disagree

I’m honing my skills at uttering subtle tautologies

heh

i agre with Jake - there's nothing technically that stops IntelliJ revving every week. Obviously that doesn't mean the entire UI changes every week. most changes are bugfixes / perf tweaks / internal refactorings anyway, and user visible features often-as-not boil down to an additional checkbox appearing in some pref pane, or a giant menu getting even more giant

they aren't anything anyone is going to care about. even the absolutely massive new feature of Kotlin, from a UI perspective, boiled down to a new option in the "New project" page, and a new submenu

this is especially true because so much of IJ is plugins and plugins can already release whenever they want, outside of IDE releases

I think a very comparable example would be Android Studio which has canary releases every two weeks or so

Are folks unaware of the EAP builds? Jetbrains releases those multiple times a day at times.

I guess I just don't understand what the benefit to the end user is when releasing on a fixed time schedule. Let's say they release every week. That means as a user it would behoove me to read their release notes every week. I don't know if that benefits me. If they release daily the release notes will probably look a lot like git commit logs. If they continue releasing as they do now, EAPs for early adopters, and a well documented and summarized release as business demands...I don't know why that is bad for me as a user?

I think the point was that engineers should be able to ship on a schedule (aka at any time). Whether the product ships or not to users is a product decision.

so if people aren’t tired of the intellij versioning debate, we can continue simple smile