[DRAFT] Proposed release schedule for 1.9.x

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 02:44:29PM -0500, Josh Sled wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 12:08 +0100, Christian Stimming wrote:
> 
> > Proposed DRAFT schedule:
> > All dates are the Sunday of a weekend. It is proposed to have a release 
> > every three week interval; we might shorten that to shorter intervals 
> > (every other week, maybe).
> > 
> >      * 1.9.0 January 29th; Initial announcement and call for venturous 
> > testers
> >      * 1.9.1 February 19th; bugfixes
> >      * 1.9.2 March 13th; String freeze; call for translations; call for 
> > more testers
> >      * 1.9.3 April 2nd; bugfixes
> >      * 1.9.4 April 23th; bugfixes
> >      * maybe? 2.0.0 May 7th; big party at German LinuxTag (cstim will 
> > probably give a GnuCash presentation there)
> 
> I think the 1.9.0 date might be a bit aggressive, but maybe not ... I
> certainly doubt we'll be at a "all pieces ported fully to g2" state, but
> as you mentioned in IRC you're not suggesting that, exactly. :)  

Hmm... I have a different concern.  I think we could basically start
rolling tarballs as soon as distcheck works, but I don't know if the
2.0.0 date is reasonable or not.  I just don't have a feeling for what
the state of g2 is right now.  Probably we won't know until we start
getting wider testing.

So, I think we should release something soon.  I don't think we need
to advertise a rigid release schedule.  I think we should aim for at
least every three weeks, but we should feel no hesitation to release
*before* three weeks if we feel we need to.

As for the first release, I still see this as labor driven though.
I've been trying to get distcheck to work for a long time, and it's
still not there yet.  The problems are obscure and tedious and very
time-consuming to test because a distcheck takes ~20 minutes to fail
(mostly spent converting translation files).  I end up doing most of
my development *during* distcheck runs.  And by the types of problems
I'm fixing, I can tell that no one else is running these.

I'd be a bit more optimistic about the release schedule if distcheck
consistently passed.  If anyone want to work on this, I an report that
the most recent failure is:

/bin/sh ../../../../libtool --tag=CC --mode=link gcc -I.. -I../.. -DLOCALE_DIR=\""/home/chris/svn/trunk/gnucash-1.9.0/_inst/share/locale"\" -I../../../../../lib/libqof/qof -I/usr/include/libxml2   -pthread -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include   -g -O2 -Wall -Wunused   -Werror -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wno-pointer-sign   -o libqof-backend-qsf.la -rpath /home/chris/svn/trunk/gnucash-1.9.0/_inst/lib  qsf-backend.lo qsf-xml-map.lo qsf-xml.lo ../../../../../lib/libqof/qof/libqof.la -pthread -lgthread-2.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0   -lxml2 -lpthread -lz -lm   -lpopt -lm  -lm
libtool: link: cannot find the library `../../../../../lib/libqof/qof/libqof.la'make[8]: *** [libqof-backend-qsf.la] Error 1
make[8]: Leaving directory `/home/chris/svn/trunk/gnucash-1.9.0/_build/lib/libqof/backend/file'

> > As for additional issues that need to be solved for these 1.9.x releases:
> 
> Also, to publicize the discussion in #gnucash from a few minutes ago, it
> seems like:
> 
> 1/ The TODO section of the wiki should be for release-related stuff, 
>    though it's unclear what, exactly.
> 
> 2a/ We should re-assert using Bugzilla for 1.9.x/2.x issue-tracking.
> 
> 2b/ We should move the remainder of GNOME2_STATUS into Bugzilla.
> 
> This last part is the one that I wanted to get sync on.  I'm proposing
> that I will move the GNOME2_STATUS line-items into Bugzilla and remove
> the file from SVN (clean up Wiki references to it, &c) on, let's say,
> Thursday night (19 Jan).  Objections?  Devs, please flush any
> un-committed GNOME2_STATUS changes.

No objection.  How well-maintainted is the bugzilla?  Are there some
bugzilla-masters out there?

-chris