Hi all, I would like to share some ideas I have to make our release plan more clearer, public and well defined.
This plan doesn't require additional work from the community (apart from the due diligence when we will call for votes) because I will take care about preparing release candidate files, sign them and call for votes; then publish them if the vote is successful. This is basically what we did in the last 2 years with the only (big) difference that the release schedule will be decided and announced in advance on fixed dates. For example, we could decide that during the year 2012 (the same scheme could be used for 2013 etc...) we will issue a release from each branch every 4 months like this: * release 11.04 around 2012-04-15 * release 11.04.01 around 2012-08-15 * release 11.04.02 around 2012-12-15 * release 10.04.01 around 2012-03-15 * release 10.04.02 around 2012-07-15 * release 10.04.03 around 2012-11-15 * release 09.04.02 around 2012-02-15 * release 09.04.03 around 2012-06-15 * release 09.04.04 around 2012-10-15 Or we could decide on a less aggressive schedule and release each branch every 6 months etc... And we could also vote in advance for the time a release branch will be closed: for example we could vote that the community will not release and apply patches to the release branch 09.04 after the release 09.04.04 (this is just an example as I would like to propose to close the 09.04 branch earlier than this). New patches/contributions (always welcome) for that branch (after it is closed) will not be applied to the branch and will stay in Jira for interested parties (unless the community will decide to reopen it). In this way users will know in advance when a branch will be deprecated, how many bug fix releases will be issued and based on this information could prepare in time for the upgrades (or switch between major releases). Of course there will be exceptions: maybe we will have to release out of schedule to fix some major security issues or we could skip a release if no changes since the previous one were committed etc... When the plan is in place we could then prepare a nice roadmap diagram to be published in our Download page. The roadmap will not be feature based and for this reason it should be doable with the current structure and resources we have in the community: I know it would be also nice to plan and work together on a features set, but this will definitely require more coordination, agreement and effort... we can (and should) always try to do that also but this is another topic (for another thread). In the meantime, with this time based release plan we will have something real to play with. Please let me know what you think. Thanks, Jacopo
