New release process for 1.8 (READ THIS)

[Daniel Stone]

Hi all,
Following on from Peter's email about the 1.8/7.6 release process[0], we
had a BoF about the same[1] at XDC.  Everyone broadly agreed on the
substance of Peter's mail, and here are our rough conclusions.

Release process: We're going to aim for a six-month release process, as
Peter outlined, with 3 months feature freeze, 2 months bugfix, and the
final month release freeze.  We're going to start this for 1.8, and
hopefully we'll be able to land predictable releases.

7.6: Either Peter or keithp will be the RM: they can arm-wrestle for it.
I assume the six-month cycle will start on the day 1.7/7.5 is released
(hopefully Monday).

Development model: xserver master will be closed to general commits; it
will be owned by the RM, or one of their delegates.  Again, DO NOT
COMMIT DIRECTLY TO XSERVER MASTER.  Everyone should have their own
xserver trees, and/or one per subsystem (I'll have xserver-xkb and an
input tree, I guess Peter will have an input tree, there should be an
EXA tree, etc, etc).  When you want to push something to master, either
send patches to the list, or send a pull request for your tree.  ajax
has quite unwisely volunteered to run a trivial-patch tree, accumulating
random misc.  When you send a pull request or patches, it's expected
that they've been tested and are working to preserve bisectability, and
don't destroy ABI every other commit, so feel free to buffer them up a
bit.  Judicious use of rebase -i is not wholly discouraged.  I know this
sounds concerning, but if your merge request just gets forgotten or
dropped on the floor, bug us until we make it happen.

Future: Around 1.10, we'd like to merge the drivers back into the core
so we can start getting a coherent API (well, any API would be a start).
We're also working on a much better testing model, with functional
testing as well as XTS, so we can exercise modesetting, input
functionality, real-world rendering, etc.

Phoronix: Yes, we're really trying this time.

Gin: Tonic.

Cheers,
Daniel

[0]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg-devel/2009-September/002231.html
[1]: http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2009/Notes#head-01bab1b9deccfa38847134d06b4234fea4229754
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