[rfc] six-month stable release cycles

[DeeJay]

" The Proposal: Bazaar will make a major release every six months,
which will be supported at least until the time of the next major
release. "

I understand all the reasons put forward and have no disagreement with them.

But can I ask for consideration for Windows users, perhaps supported
by a change in the Release mechanism?

At present, it seems that the formal release process does not
acknowledge the existence of installers. So a release can pass all its
own QA measures but still encounter problems when it is packaged into
an installer. My experience is with the 'standalone' .exe installer
for Windows, but perhaps similar problems are encountered by MacOSX
users?  [As examples, 1.17rc1  - 'noise' related to rebase; and
1.17final - 'bzr help commands' - were both 'broken' on Windows via
the Installer. It would be uncomfortable to have to live with such
releases for 6 months.]

Could packaging, and testing, of Installers be brought within the
Release Management process? (I think I have seen it suggested
elsewhere that if the 'core' team can't build and test on a platform
for which support is claimed then they should be provided with that
capability for the good of the project.)

The download stats now visible on LP show upwards of 2,500 downloads
of the standalone .exe installers for recent versions of bzr, so a lot
of people could be impacted by a release that fails in packaging, and
that could cause a lot of reputation damage to bzr. Of course you can
produce a bug-fix release - but that undermines the "people don't know
which version to package" argument that is part of the justification
for change.

Thanks for listening -

David