I was one of the original instigators of Parrot's monthly release plan, though I think it did postdate Nick's plan to do the same thing with Perl 5.8.

I haven't had much to do with the Parrot release cycle since its inception. It does seem to be working pretty well for Parrot and didn't work out well for Perl 5. My _guess_ about why it worked for Parrot is that we set it up with a rotating roster of monthly release engineers and a schedule 4-5 months out. If one of the volunteers couldn't do the release, the schedule just slid up a month.

Perl 5, on the other hand, has always been set up such that that the Pumpkings were both Emperor and Janitor. If the person doing the release isn't also the architect and chief coder, it might work better. And chromatic's right. When you release every month, you actually get to test your releng and upgrade tools.

chromatic,

If you were going to switch Perl over to an "every $PERIOD, whether we need it or not" release cycle, how would you do it? What can you tell p5p about what Parrot's learned about how to make the release cycle trivial and repeatable?

-Jesse