Proposal: no more alphas/betas for Wayland releases

[Neal Gompa]

On Tue, May 20, 2025 at 4:03 PM Simon Ser <contact at emersion.fr> wrote:
>
> 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?
>

Funnily enough, I think wlroots should probably have them since
wlroots releases are so highly disruptive for basically every
consumer...

That said, going straight to RCs for libwayland itself seems
reasonable. But, do we even need those? Could we go straight to
release since the churn is so low?



-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!