[rfc] six-month stable release cycles

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ian Clatworthy writes:

 > achieve. You've presented a clear case for:
 > 
 > 1. moving to a 6 monthly cycle as our *primary* one
 > 2. having a stable branch with important bug fixes
 > 
 > Given those changes, what is the driver behind continuing to do monthly
 > releases? Who is the audience for those exactly?

4. *Real* :) beta testers.  There are a couple of folks who follow
bzr.dev (as I've mentioned before :-) who have been *very* productive
in terms of catching stuff that the core dev team does not.  But
because (1) the core process is quite successful in adding regression
tests and (2) most of the bzr.dev community will have personal
processes pretty compatible with "the bzr Way", it's important to
encourage *new* testers to exercise the code in as various ways as
possible.  PPAs and Windows / Mac installers are an important form of
encouragement.