[draft] Release plans for 1.9.0?

[Christian Stimming]

Dear gnucash developers,

almost two weeks ago I proposed a release schedule for the upcoming 
unstable 1.9.x release series. See
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2006-January/015658.html
and http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Release_Schedule

The goal of the 1.9.x series, starting with 1.9.0, is to provide easier 
access for testers to a source package. The goal is *not* to be at the 
"all pieces ported fully to g2" state! Instead, all of these releases 
will be clearly marked as "work in progress", but I guess we will 
immediately get a much broader testing audience once we actually start 
to distribute the unstable tarballs.

That said, I proposed in that original mail to have the initial 1.9.0 
release quite soon, namely on next Sunday, January 29th. The question 
is: What do think needs to be finished before a 1.9.0 release?  Because 
if there isn't any outstanding issue, we could just as well go ahead and 
in fact *do* the 1.9.0 release this Sunday. Whoa.

One answer is given by the outstanding bugs in bugzilla which are marked 
with milestone=1.9.0: 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=GnuCash&target_milestone=1.9.0 

If you have any more issues, please always add them to bugzilla. 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash If you think 
these should be fixed before a particular release, mark them with the 
respective milestone.

That query currently says there is one more bug that should be fixed 
before 1.9.0, namely the "Crash on opening 1.8 datafile with renamed 
reports". But it's not clear whether this has been fixed by Chris and/or 
cannot be reproduced anymore. If it isn't that much of an issue any 
longer then maybe we can move it to a later target. If it is still an 
issue then we need to fix it.

So. What are we going to do? Having a 1.9.0 release this Sunday might 
sound agressive, but OTOH what do we gain by postponing to some later 
point in time? If there are particular issues that we think need to be 
resolved, then I'd propose just the next weekend: Feb 5th. But if there 
aren't any more issues, then we can just take this weekend...

We'd still need to point out somebody as the designated release dude who 
will prepare and upload the tarball. Chris Lyttle did this in 1.8.x. 
Chris, would you be available to do this for 1.9.x as well or should we 
point out someone else?

What do people think?

Christian