DAT Releases

[C0llector]

Must be in a mood to post messages today.

Regarding the release of new tosec dats, I hope you manage to steer away from the mad panics created in the past by the mentality of Oooo cripes we can't do a release untill xxxx date because we must release at least 30 updated dats at a time. I remember this happening all the time and to be honest there isn't much point to it I'd much prefer a release of one or two dats every couple of weeks or when the person doing the renaming thinks that his work is done for a while then hey let's release a new dat to the masses. Rather than hmm I submitted my new dat 3 weeks ago and it still hasn't been made available.

One other thing that may be usefull, depends on the individual renamer's opinions tho would be to have a renamers Blog spot on here where they could post about what they are working on and how they are progressing.

Just a thought

[Cassiel]

Whilst I agree we shouldn’t have huge gaps between releases (as has happened before) we also shouldn’t just release a load of DATs because 'its been long enough' and current issues aren’t being resolved (the last official release felt a lot like that).

I think quarterly releases (at a similar time) makes the most sense, and gives a better impression of the project sticking around for awhile (rather than looking dead or all over the place with releases).

Bit of consistency for once…..

Every two weeks or something is way too frequent. Everyone without intimate knowledge of project (like who hangs around here every day) is constantly gonna get confused between ‘old’ and ‘new’ DATs, needed files they missing etc.

[TKaos]

I would like to see a release like every 2 months and I don't really care if many DATs get updated in that time but it shouldn't be a problem to do atleast a bit in these 2 months and even if just 10 files get added to a DAT because that could be done in 1 day and then the renamer would be "free" for the rest of the time in those months.

[Cassiel]

Two months could be fine too.... my point is we need to have a consistant release schedule, not just when somone submits something and wants it released 'now'. And same with other end of specrum (not the system! hehe), we shouldn't hold off indefinatly on a release, waiting on one particular DAT to finaly get sent or whatever.

(disclaimer: despite what I just said, I do think theres a lot of value to all the clean ups we doing atm, and we shouldnt rush to do a release 'just because').

And weeks rather than months is too frequent though, IMO.....

[C0llector]

Hey I'm happy with a couple of months, I'm also happy with any clean up work that's being done to the existing dats and lets face it a full rescan of the existing sets with a conversion to the new region/language codes isn't going to be a five minute job.

The only reason I posted on this subject was to gauge the response to the "Only when we have 30/50 whatever number of dats available" mentality. I am quite happy for smaller qty of dats to be released on a regular basis as it shows that things are actively progressing rather than stagnating. I realise only too well that real life can get in the way of working on any project especially when it's a voluntary project that can take up an immense amount of time.

In it's heyday TOSEC probably had about 60 people working on various systems sometimes collaborating on individual systems, some people working on their own. I can remember working with quite a few people who seem to have vanished off the earth but am grateful to everyone of them for the time and effort they put into renaming for TOSEC.

[PandMonium]

Like i said, i agree with you and there are much more advantages doing small but more frequent releases, better for the project, to get things synced easily, avoid more work being lost when a renamer disappears and also raising the interest on the project / making the external submitions / help useful, because if someone now submits a datfile based on some broken dat from 2006 it won't be of much help.

Actually the conversion between countries and languages is done and also most of the tnc errors, off course there are tons of things wrong and missing, from dates to publishers, scene groups and so on.
Hope we can start releasing soon anyway