Date Based Releases

[MattyT]

For those of you who didn't see the webtools thread, Bugzilla will
probably be moving to date-based releases for 2.20 and beyond, in
response to the enormously long periods for the feature-based releases
2.16 and 2.18.  The current plan is as follows:

The releases will be approximately six-monthly to start with.  This I
think should be an upper limit, and we could perhaps consider to go to
four-monthly later if things runs smoothly.  More releases means code
gets out faster and developers have less pain missing a release, and I
don't think there's much overhead from extra releases, given pretty much
all work before and after a release will be proportionately smaller.

There will be no promises of features appearing in releases, on behalf
of the Bugzilla project.  We have no way of guaranteeing features in a
given or reasonable time frame.  If you want to make an individual
promise to someone, it's on your head.  =)

The date-based part of the release process will be the feature freeze. 
All other aspects of development will stay "when they're ready".  This
in particular means the releases will only be approximately six months
apart.

When the tree opens for 2.19, there will be six months of development
time.  Once this elapses, a feature freeze will be declared, at which
point the tree will be closed to anything that is not a user or
administrator-visible bug fix, docs updates or an otherwise
freeze-approved checkin.

This will continue until the tree is declared fit for RC1.  At this
point, the tree will branch, and HEAD will reopen for development.  The
branch will continue the RC cycle until it's ready for release.

Note that the tree closed time will be deducted from the development
time for the next release, which will mean the feature freezes will stay
exactly every six months.  One would not expect this to be greater than
1-2 weeks, if which case the development time would be about 5 months
2-3 weeks.

-- 
         Matthew Tuck: Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy        
 My Short Autobiography: 1985 Grade Bin Monitor 1990 Class Clown Award
1992 Awarded Most Likely To Spontaneously Combust 1996 Crowned Galactic
         Emperor 1998 Released From Smith Psychiatric Hospital