Oh no, another bloody Joomla! update (1.5.13)

This morning while swiftly going through my e-mail – yeahyeah, people are in line to be able to use the Internet here – I was unpleasantly surprised by another Joomla! update release last night. After having already been surprised by 1.5.11 and 1.5.12 being release so shortly after their predesessors.

Because I'm on a holiday, I'm not constantly hooked to the Internet – though some people might think differently. All the same later today I wanted to check my iPhone Tweetie for stuff I might have missed out on. Imagine my surprise when I found out that there had already been discovered quite a large bug in 1.5.13.

Some time ago (about a month) something similar happened. An update had just been released and quite a number of people had already updated many of their websites, when a bug turned out to have been overlooked. The problem was fortunately tackled instantly, but still...

Minutes after the discovery of the bug, discussions unfolded on Twitter on wether or not this was acceptable or not. Some people thought it was, other didn't. My opinion at that time was, that one cannot complain about free software, but can't they?

I myself – as have many co-Joomla!-builders – have invested a lot of time in Joomla!. The knowledge I gained, I try to pass on in both my own projects as well as other Joomla-enthousiasts in the spirit of “spread the word”. The question however is, how well this word can be spread if developments on the stable version go as they have been going lately. To me it's all bad PR.

What I mean by that? Well, you do the math; since january 2008 there have been 13 Joomla! Updates. That's 13 updates in 19 months. About 1.5 update a month that is. If however, we look at the last 4 months, we notice 4 updates since March 28th 2009. Which is actually 1 update per month. And it's not even 28th July yet! What I'm trying to say is that it seems that people are too eager to come up with fixes lately. This rush doesn't do any good for the quality of the product. Shouldn't things releases be tested more thoroughly and can we not complain if this doesn't happen?

I'm very curious as to what others in “the world of Joomla!” have to say about this subject. And before you go berserk on me realise this: “I'm very happy with Joomla! And all the effort that's being put in to it by both developers and us as a community (mind you: I've done my share of contributing to the dutch community), but this I had to get off my chest!”