2.20 Freeze status

[Gervase Markham]

David Miller wrote:
> We will be reopening the trunk for development and aborting the 2.20 
> freeze.  Our previous release schedule will be pushed back 6 months, so 
> that we will now be freezing for 2.20 on March 15th 2005, and for 2.22 
> (or 3.0, or whatever the next version winds up being) on September 15th, 
> 2005.  

I still suggest that we should only fix the proposed release date of 
version X + 2 when we've released version X, and try hard to make the X 
-> X + 2 difference about six months.

So say we release 2.18 on 20th January. We then say "OK, we want to 
release 2.20 on 20th July, so let's freeze on 20th April, two months 
before."

Again, I make the point that if we are supporting for 18 months, and 
doing "6-month development cycles", we must, must not release more often 
than every 6 months, or we'll end up in a five-or-more-branch support 
mess. To avoid releasing too close together, it makes sense to set the 
release date of X + 2 only when we've released X, and then work the 
freeze date back from it.

> We have very good faith still that this whole mess was caused 
> because of the huge development window that 2.18 used, and as long as we 
> keep to this schedule from now on, we shouldn't have to do this again.

That's optimistic :-)

> In order to keep everyone focused on the release process, the trunk will 
> not reopen until 2.16.8, 2.18, and 2.19.2 are released.

Good plan.

Gerv