On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 12:43 PM, Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Getting the merges reviewed [0] and making sure we have a good set of
> release notes. That's what I know of, and Reedy's been working on the
> latter.
>
I've been thinking about this over the past few days, and I've got a proposed
release schedule and development roadmap to carry us through the rest of the
year.
As we all know, 1.17 is due to drop Real Soon Now. To summarize for those who
don't know the status: it's pretty much done. In talking with Roan, Tim and Sam
earlier this week, we discussed that we're pretty much ready to drop a
1.17beta1.
Tim was concerned about the release notes, but as I pointed out in my previous
e-mail, Sam's tidied this up (and it's low-hanging fruit if someone wants to
check behind us for sanity). That being said, I don't see any reason why we
can't drop a beta1 sometime this week. Give it a week, and drop a beta2. Wait
another week, then go final I think, all depending on what response we get from
the betas.
As for 1.18, I say we branch it the same day we drop 1.17 final (making the
branch is easy). There's still quite a bit of code to review, but going ahead
and giving ourselves a cutoff point will make catching up easier. Large projects
still outstanding in 1.18 to review are the img_metadata merge, and rewrites of
Skin and Action code. By branching soon I think we can try to get a release out
by the end of summer, at the very latest.
Looking ahead to 1.19, I'd like to do the same and branch soon after 1.18 has
been dropped. Since 1.19's a little further out and hasn't started taking shape
yet, I'd like to go ahead and propose what sort of release we should aim for.
Going back over the past couple of releases, we've had quite a few "rewrites"
of major portions of code. While these are a necessary part of the process of
developing MW, they are difficult to review due to their complexity. This
complexity also makes it more likely for things to break. If I may be so bold,
I would like to ask that 1.19 not contain any of these rewrites. Let's focus on
making it a bugfix/cleanup release. Personally I think it would make for a very
clean and polished release, as well as reducing the time for us to review and
ship it.
If we go this route, I don't see any reason we couldn't ship 1.19 by year end
(or if we really push, 11.11.11, as the other thread suggested). I
think it would
put us in a really good place to move forward into 2012, and help get us back
into a somewhat regular release pattern.
I really would love to hear from people to see if they think I'm crazy or if
this could work out fairly well. I know it's pretty tl;dr for most people, but
the ones who read it are the ones I wanna hear from anyway ;-)
-Chad