Hi, I am the developer of PdfDing. One thing I am not sure about is the frequency of my releases. What do you folks prefer in self-hosted projects? More releases in order to get new features as fast as possible or fewer releases with bigger feature additions?
I prefer rarer, bigger, more tested updates, since I don’t pull the updated docker containers that regularly.
From experience shipping releases, “bigger updates” and “more tested” are more or less antithetical. The testing surface area tends to grow exponentially with the amount of features you ship with a given release, to the point I tend to see small, regular releases, as a better sign of stability.
“Bigger” is a bit missleading here. Really bigger updates obviously require a major version bump to signify to users that there is potential stability or breakage issues expected.
But “bigger” in the other sense i.e. meaning slower, means that there was more time for people to run pre-release versions if they are adventurous and thus there is better testing.
Of course this assumes that there are actual beta testers and that it is easy to do so by creating such beta releases.
If your software is following semver, not necessarily. It only requires a major version bump if a change is breaking backwards compatibility. You can have very big minor releases and tiny major releases.
Again, by experience, this is assuming a lot.
Well usually the opposite happens. People make many releases and outsource the testing to unsuspecting users.
This is IMHO fine if you clearly mark these releases as release candidates or such, so that people can make their own risk judgement. But usually that isn’t the case and one minor version looks like any other unless you have a closer look at the actual changes in the code.