Release planning

[Andreas Köhler]

Hi,

you may have noticed that the latest releases 2.2.2 and 2.2.3 of GnuCash
landed rather surprisingly and without any discussion on gnucash-devel.
I want to change that.  Surely, we will not be able to follow or copy
fast and definite release schedules such as the GNOME one, but it would
be good to at least have one (again).

Whatever we decide on, we should make sure that
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Release_Schedule
reflects that afterwards.


 GnuCash 2.2.x
===============

The wiki page says
"We don't have an actual schedule yet. We only know we plan for a stable
2.2.x release every 3-6 weeks in order to make available the bugfixes
and translation updates."

As can be seen at the four months gap between 2.2.1 and 2.2.2, we did
not actually follow these 3-6 weeks.  OTOH, I think the list of changes
in 2.2.2 shows that it could have been released earlier perfectly well.
Given that the people's time that is devoted to the development of the
project, whether on trunk or branches/2.2, is rather changeable, I am
not sure whether 3 weeks (danger: trivial release) or 6 weeks (danger:
deferred hot fixes) is something we can settle on as a fixed interval.
Maybe we can on 4 weeks?

Whether there is a long-planned release date or a more spontaneous one
(feel free to request ones), I want to send out a reminder/warning 7
days before that date, so that translators, bug fix contributors,
backport reviewers and whoever is interested is prepared.  Approximately
24 hours before I start building the tarballs (I will try to provide UTC
times), it would be good to have a hard code freeze, i.e. only
translation updates or critical build system fixes are allowed.  This
time frame should be used as a last resort to test and detect newly
introduced regressions.  I am not sure whether there is a rule of thumb
about how to handle those, though. Assuming that Nathan is readily
available to build the win32 setup.exe then, the release will be done
within the following 24 hours.

 GnuCash 2.3.x
===============

As I do not know the state of some of the branches, I have no idea about
when to start with 2.3.x unstable releases.  So I ask you all how to
proceed.

What do you think?

-- andi5