Results of NYC gathering: development schedule

[Derek Atkins]

On Saturday, June 10th, a bunch of GnuCash developers (and
non-developers) met in New York City for a few hours for lunch
and discussion.  We discussed lots of topics, but I just wanted
to report on the major results that we agreed upon.

* we want to get 2.0.0 released as soon as possible.  I think we're
  well on the road there and probably could even get it out this
  weekend.

* The 2.0.x release branch should be reserved for translations and
  critical bug-fixes only.  The reason for this is....

* As soon as we branch, tag, and release 2.0.0, we should start
  working on 2.2.  The 2.2 release should pull down David's
  gtk2-deprecated branch, Chris' register rewrite branch, Josh's SX
  rewrite, and then anything else that can be done in the timeframe.
  The PLAN is to start the 2.1.x test releases in September 2006,
  targetting the 2.2.0 release in late December ('06) or early
  January 2007.

* In order to increase the stability and releasability of the
  codebase, major development should happen on development branches.
  Developers working on a major feature should work in a branch,
  making commits, and then merge the dev branch back into the trunk.
  Smaller features can, of course, be commited directly into the
  trunk.

* We discussed ChangeLogs...  I don't recall the actual outcome (if
  any), but I'm beginning to change my thinking on this.  If we move
  to a more development-branch-oriented process then keeping ChangeLog
  entries becomes much more challenging.  We should still create a
  ChangeLog for release tarballs during "make dist", but we can build
  that from the Subversion Log messages.  The NEWS file can still be
  hand edited when new features are pulled into trunk.  If we DO
  decide to change how we do ChangeLogs then we should decide to do it
  either as of 2.0.0, or as of 2.2.0.

So, in summary:

- 2.0 ASAP
- 2.0.x limited to translation updates and critical bugfixes
- 2.1.x test releases starting September 2006
- 2.2 release around December/January

Guys, did I forget anything?

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available