An open-source project I use on a daily basis recently released a new version. So I eagerly installed it to see how it works, and ran into a problem. I spent a few minutes debugging, and determined it was almost certainly a bug, so I filed a bug report. As I was writing the bug report, I saw that the release status in GitHub said “7 minutes ago”. So, yeah, I was filing a bug report less than 7 minutes after the version was released. Wow.

An hour or so later, one of the maintainers confirmed it was a bug, but with one of their upstream dependencies, not with the project itself. He also submitted a fix to the upstream library, and by the time I’m writing this, it has been merged into the upstream dependency, and the project I use has already updated the dependency version. All is good!

The problem?

They’re not releasing a new version of the project yet. The reason?

I think we will wait 1 or 2 days, just to have some feedback from other users.

Ugh.

WHY?

I, and presumably a non-zero number of other users, cannot use this project until they cut a new release. So waiting to release hurts me and a few others.

Further, I cannot provide feedback on the other features of the new release, because I can’t use the other features of the new release, until the new version is released.

This project has a proven solution to a known user-facing bug… and they’re sitting on it. Functionality users can’t use is waste.

VERSION NUMBERS ARE FREE!

There is literally an unlimited number of version numbers available. You’re not going to run out if you release “too often”.