Weekly(ish) 0.19 release update - ongoing development

[Martin Pool]

On 7/31/07, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-07-31 at 21:26 +0100, James Westby wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > This is the weekly status update for the 0.19 release process. There
> > wasn't one last week, but I will make them weekly from now on.
> >
> > Thanks to all who have contributed so far, there has been a lot of
> > discussion and reviewing on the list which is good to see.
> >
> > I don't feel the need to bring the release forward at all, there is
> > nothing that seems compelling enough that has landed so far, and it
> > feels like there are some good changes hanging around the corner. I
> > don't know if they will make this release, and some may be more suitable
> > for merging at the start of a window, but it is exciting nevertheless.

I'm confused.  I thought the freeze was going to be this week, not later,
and that James had proposed to slip it but everyone else disagreed.
Robert said he thought we had consensus to consider it in bugfix-only mode
now.

> I think this is misguided on two counts:
>  - Aaron and John (to pick two names :)) have landed huge changes in
> performance, doubling the speed of merge and making countless other
> operations incrementally faster.
>  - The *whole point* of time based releases is that they *happen*, NOT
> that they *be exciting*.

I agree with Robert.

This confusion is probably partly because we neglected to put the dates
into the release calendar.  We should do that at the start of the cycle.

  http://bazaar-vcs.org/ReleaseRoadmap
  http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?mode=AGENDA&src=guihot0nclfmtb0brb8jlkt1so%40group.calendar.google.com

I think we should take the feature freeze date as next Monday/Tuesday.
That gives a chance to people who thought they still had two weeks, but
means we don't slip two weeks - basically splitting the difference.

I don't want to be autocratic, but it takes 24h for everyone to respond to
a list thread by which time we'd be almost at the earliest rc date.  Let's
just take it as settled:

  6 Aug   feature freeze, bugfixes only into trunk
 13 Aug   rc1
 20 Aug   release

The general idea is that we release on the US/Pacific Monday (when more
people are around), which is Tuesday in Australasia.

-- 
Martin