Releasing 5.0 sooner rather than later

[Mark Côté]

At the Bugzilla meeting today[1], two important, related items were
agreed upon:

1. We should release more often, approximately every six months, with
   whatever features are ready at that time.

2. We should release version 5.0 as soon as possible.

With regards to point 1, rather than creating a list of features that
should go into a particular version, we will release whatever we have
ready in the master branch every six months or so.  This is to avoid
having features that are ready and tested languish while other features
are implemented.  Case in point: the REST API was completed last year
but is still available only in the master branch.

We will keep semantic versioning, that is, releases with breaking or
other major changes will have a major version bump (e.g. 5.0), and
smaller changes will have a minor version bump (e.g. 5.2).  Critical bug
fixes, particularly for security vulnerabilities, will continue to be
released to all applicable supported versions at any time, as needed,
with patch version numbers (e.g. 5.2.1).  This means that we may have
major versions released in succession, but with our current policy of
supporting three versions at any time, users will have the choice of
putting off an upgrade for a year if they don't want to deal with two
major upgrades in a row.

We will also announce that an upcoming version will have breaking or
other major changes as soon as possible in the development cycle.

With this in mind, we decided to do a release as soon as possible.
Because master currently requires a newer Perl version than 4.4, we are
calling this release 5.0.  Incomplete features planned for 5.0,
including the Sandstone skin, markdown support in comments, inline
history, and a few others, will be punted off to the next version.  We
are waiting for one important bug fix, which should be completed in a
week or so, at which point we will create a 5.0 branch and start the QA
cycle.

Mark

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Meetings:2014-05-28
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