by Lowlander » Wed Oct 01, 2014 9:18 am
No, it's that there are 100s of simple little requests and then any specific small request is a lot of work due to so many small requests that need to be taken care off. Thus development time needs to be allocated to some requests only. Unfortunately that means we all have many requests that are still outstanding. Additionally a big problem is localization. Any request that results in new text to be used requires it to be translated. This means that those requests automatically get delayed till the big releases where they can do localization changes. There is also user perception of easy (I do presume this is "easy"), where what seems easy on the surface, may affect much more code and thus require more work/testing than we realize and thus gets delayed for big updates. Then there is also the concern about the eco-system (again I doubt it's an issue here) where updates may affect Addons, which shouldn't happen too often.
Don't forget that the current 4.1.x update cycle we're going through is mostly meant for bug fixes and not any new features/requests. A 4.2 release would have smaller features/requests included and a 5.x release could be a major rewrite (thinks Skin engine/Addon framework/features), where the eco-system could have big impacts (Skins/Addons/localization). As an example. 4.0 got DLNA capability, 4.1 got DLNA enhanced with Play To whereas 4.0.x and 4.1.x releases got specific DLNA (generally with specific DLNA clients) issues fixed.
No, it's that there are 100s of simple little requests and then any specific small request is a lot of work due to so many small requests that need to be taken care off. Thus development time needs to be allocated to some requests only. Unfortunately that means we all have many requests that are still outstanding. Additionally a big problem is localization. Any request that results in new text to be used requires it to be translated. This means that those requests automatically get delayed till the big releases where they can do localization changes. There is also user perception of easy (I do presume this is "easy"), where what seems easy on the surface, may affect much more code and thus require more work/testing than we realize and thus gets delayed for big updates. Then there is also the concern about the eco-system (again I doubt it's an issue here) where updates may affect Addons, which shouldn't happen too often.
Don't forget that the current 4.1.x update cycle we're going through is mostly meant for bug fixes and not any new features/requests. A 4.2 release would have smaller features/requests included and a 5.x release could be a major rewrite (thinks Skin engine/Addon framework/features), where the eco-system could have big impacts (Skins/Addons/localization). As an example. 4.0 got DLNA capability, 4.1 got DLNA enhanced with Play To whereas 4.0.x and 4.1.x releases got specific DLNA (generally with specific DLNA clients) issues fixed.