Proposal: no more alphas/betas for Wayland releases

[Simon Ser]

Hi all,

With years passing by, development in the main Wayland repository has
slowed down quite a bit, activity has moved over to wayland-protocols
and compositors. However, cutting a new Wayland release is still a
heavyweight process: it takes at least one and a half months with at
least 3 pre-releases. I'm also not sure about the value of all of these
pre-releases: historically they've been used to push the last features
over the fence before the RCs, but it's easy enough to talk and
coordinate over the bits that we want to wait on for the release.

I would suggest to drop the alphas/betas from the release process, ie.
go straight to RC1. The process would then continue as usual, with
weekly RCs. As a release manager this would help reduce the load. This
is also what I've been doing for Sway and wlroots for a very long time.

Would this make sense? Are there other reasons why alphas/betas were
valuable?

Thanks,

Simon