Currently we recommend people to use the
latest SVN builds. But the past showed, that this releases can be broken. This can be for only some platforms or to introduce global bugs or cause problems with data from various maptool versions.
IMHO we need to remember, that Navit is a navigation system. So users ger really frustrated, if it's not working out of the box and doesn't fit the min. requirements. I think for that reason, we need to establish some
better testing. Very close to that is that our plugins/API require some semi static compatibility checks, to work with the uptodate interfaces.
This testing processes will take time if it should be done right and for all of our platforms, so we need a lower release frequency. If we see our logs, the most changes were minimal (from a enduser POV) and so, I don't see problems if we only publish a stable release every few months.
Another point is that a
roadmap planing requires fixpoints for scheduling and to determine the expecte release date.(Here maybe better tool support is requiered but TRAC offers at least very limited possibilities).
Last but not least, the most
ditros/repositories use release based distribution and seem to have currently problems to pick good SVN versions for building packages. This means for us, that people require a lot support, because the versions differ very much and sometimes they need to build their own (more uptodate) versions from scratch.