qbzr 0.19b1 late - sorry [RFC] Release cadence balance wrong?

[Gary van der Merwe]

I was meant to have done the 0.19b1 release yesterday, but I didn't
because I was deving cool bug fixes and features. I'm sorry it's late.
I'm sure I will get it out before the end of this weekend.

I've been thinking about it today; and I feel that we don't have the
correct balance between time doing development and time doing release
related tasks.

I guess I'm feeling this way because:

* I spent alot of time updating the ppas for bzr 2.1 and all plugins in
the ppa. This took about 2 weeks of my "can spend on bzr time available
time". Maybe this was misspent time. But ppas are the easiest way to get
the software out to ubuntu users.

* bzr is synchronizing it's releases with ubuntu. 2.0 was late, and so
2.1 had to play catch up, and so felt shortened.

* Maintaining a stable branch has increased our release costs.

* A serious bug in the treewidget that took a long time isolate, and
fix, put off other more interesting work.

Now those things are out of the way, I've just gotten into the zone with
some interesting work, but I have to stop that, and do a release.

Maybe all of these contributing factors are abnormal, and there isn't
really a problem. I don't know.

So, some ideas on how we can fix this:

* Look at ways that we can reduce our release cost. Any ideas ?
* May be release less frequently during the beta phases, but with the
same frequency during the rc and final phases. I would like for qbzr
release to stay insync with bzr releases, so this would need buy in from
bzr.

Comments ?

Gary