countdown to bzr 2.1

[Martin Pool]

We now have about ten days til the scheduled release of bzr 2.1.0rc1
<https://edge.launchpad.net/bzr/2.1>, which is the feature freeze date
for 2.1.0final a couple of weeks later.

This is shaping up to be a good stable release with many improvements,
particularly to memory usage, documentation and performance.  The
plugins, especially bzr explorer/qbzr, foreign branches, bzr-trac, and
loggerhead have also come along in leaps and bounds.

Since the stable release process went well with 2.0 we intend to do
the same thing for 2.1: it'll get bugfix updates, but nothing
disruptive, for at least six months.  I think we should keep
supporting 2.0, and merging bugs to there first, though we might
reduce the frequency of updates.

The rc1 mark is going to be the last chance for some types of changes
to get into the 2.1 release.  So if you want to deprecate any features
or APIs, now's a great time: don't try to rush it in.

If someone would like to try it, I think now would be a good time to
deprecate some of the command synonyms we introduced in the very early
days, like 'clone' for 'bzr branch'.  This probably isn't helping
understanding and it constrains the names available for other
purposes.  To get rid of them, I suggest we make them give a warning
in 2.1 and then they can be removed in 2.2, six months later.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>