[pulseaudio-discuss] 3.0 release schedule

[Arun Raghavan]

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply. I'm just replying to this thread
randomly at the end, since there are things I want to mention from each
of the previous replies.

First, my original rationale while proposing a release schedule: there
are too many players that I'd like to keep happy, including Ubuntu,
Fedora, GNOME and KDE. A 4 month release cycle means that picking up the
most recent release will never gives each project/distro a version
that's too stale (<=4 months) to depend on, and we don't have to tie
ourselves to any other project's release schedule. This is why I'd
rather have 4 months from release date to release date, and work harder
at trying to keep within that schedule (i.e., I stick by the September
release I proposed).

On the other hand, I'm not keen on doing less than 4 months between
releases. A shorter release cycle means there is a smaller "merge
window" to pull in patches and test, and (debatably) more time in
freezes. IMHO, 4 months allows us to strike a balance between release
often, and leave enough time to merge big patch sets, test and be
reasonably confident that they work well.

Now as for how do we decide release blockers -- it's really a judgement
call between all of us, and I think we've done a good job on 1.0 and
2.0. For feature blockers that don't look like they'll be completed, we
just drop blocker status. For bugs and regressions, we fix them. Every
crasher is not a blocker -- there are cases where we have no means of
reproducing some crashers, in which case blocking on those would be
silly.

Finally, David (and all other distro folks) -- we've been pretty open to
doing point releases with stability fixes if required. So if you think
having one would be good, just bring it up. It isn't too hard to roll
these out, and if it makes people's lives simpler, I'm all for it. If
not explicitly requested, the idea is that we'll only make them for
regressions or major bugs in a x.0 release.

I hope I've addressed all the questions that came up on the thread, and
I promise to reply to your replies a lot sooner than this took. :)

-- Arun