Proposal: no more alphas/betas for Wayland releases

[Jonas Ådahl]

On Tue, May 20, 2025 at 08:03:02PM +0000, Simon Ser 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?

Personally I think only RCs are enough for what kind of changes tend to
go into the wayland repo these days.


Jonas

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Simon