On Tuesday, 24 April 2018 at 17:02:50 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Honestly, I'd hate to have major releases be that infrequent. It can already be annoying enough when something that doesn't get added doesn't end up being released for a two or three months, depending on the timing. The slower the turnaround time, the longer it is before we can take advantage of any improvements. If we were going to do fewer releases, I'd much rather see us do less with minor releases than spread out major releases more.
Please read all the info, in particular semver.org. I'd argue for strictly non-breaking backwards-compatible additions in minor releases, which should (could) be most phobos additions.
Not breaking anything with an addition is of course a double-edged sword. Still it would give us a cleaner distinction where deprecations et.al. are only to be expected every 6 months with a major release, while bi-monthly minor releases remained fully backwards compatible. This seems to hit a better balance between regularly releasing new stuff and causing update churn. In particular since deprecations are on a much longer schedule, it makes sense to batch them anyhow.
TL;DR same rate of improvements, less frequent rate of deprecations and required code changes
