Question

In a question about the update of the Balsamiq plugin, I was told "we cannot control how often FogBugz OnDemand gets updated with newer versions of the plugins. I think they try to do it every other week or every 3 weeks." Is this schedule public somewhere? So that we can estimate when we will see a new release once a plugin author announces an update?

Answer 1

When:

The latest approved On Demand plugins are made available whenever we upgrade On Demand. At most frequent, we can update during our maintenance windows on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

All of the other little details are outlined in the deployment process.

Estimates:

When I approve plugins, I always try to give a decent estimate of when the plugin will go live. If I find that I'm estimating at greater then a week, I encourage our development lead to cut a special release. So, theoretically, a plugin author will always be able to tell her users when the plugin will be live.

Backstory:

There's an unfortunate coupling between our plugin deployment and our core FogBugz deployment processes, which means that if our core changes aren't ready, we hold back the plugins. In practice, however, if ever there are more than two plugins awaiting deployment, we'll cut a special release if not just for the sake of making those plugins available.

The degenerate case of stalled plugin deployment usually occurred when there's a single plugin with a minor change, or when a plugin author doesn't notify us that they have a new version which they want available. This hasn't happened since I began heading up deployment efforts, and I hope to avoid it happening again. I apologize to anyone who has experienced exceptionally slow turnaround on plugin approval or deployment.

As the plugin community becomes more and more active, I'm positive that the deployment cycles will become more and more fluid: More plugins equates to a greater incentive to deploy regularly, which equates to a greater need for decoupled plugins with fully automated deployment. When we have so many plugins that our current methods become completely unmaintainable, we'll just have to provide a substantially more awesome framework for plugin developers. I'm looking forward to that.

Answer 2

The plugin deployment process is outlined over here. :)

Answer 3

I can backup what Balsamiq is saying. Sometimes FBOD approvals/updates go through really quickly, but I have also seen it take over a month even for a minor bug fix.

I think they just haven't gotten the process down for FBOD approvals yet, but am fairly confident from my interactions with them that they are indeed working to provide a more expedited process.