Guys,
I agree with Neil ... it's not the length of the development part of the cycle, it's the length of the beta testing.
I do think an online bug tracker (bugzilla or whatever) would help. I also think that having a person in charge of "testing" would help as well ... no biggie, just someone whose duty it is to e-mail people in the community and ask about the results of testing, especially on the more obscure ports. I think a few e-mail reminders would do a *lot* to speed things up. But I'm not volunteering for this job; managing the release PR is "herding cats" enough!
Maybe some sort of automated distributed build farm would be a good idea. Check out http://build.samba.org/about.html to see how samba does it (much lighter than the Mozilla tinderbox approach).
We wouldn't need to be as intensive as they appear to be - maybe a once or twice a day download and test run would do the trick, but it could pick up lots of breakage fairly quickly.
That is not to say that more intensive testing isn't also needed on occasion.
cheers
andrew
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