[rfc] six-month stable release cycles

[Ian Clatworthy]

Vincent Ladeuil wrote:

>     jam> In my opinion we can also do something which brings in most of what you
>     jam> want. Namely:
> 
>     jam> 1) Plan to release a beta every 4weeks, without an RC period.
>     jam> 2) If a given beta has obvious issues, plan to release the next beta in
>     jam> 1 week, rather than 4 weeks. (Similar to how we would go from RC1 +
>     jam> minor fixes => final.)
> 
>     jam> This avoids always generating 2 releases, but gives the
>     jam> same stability guarantees that we have today.
> 
> Full agreement.

Yes, that sounds good to me.

>     jam> I don't think nightlies give anything like the same
>     jam> experience of monthlies. Even if a person only upgraded
>     jam> once a month, there is a lot of unknowns in saying "I'm
>     jam> at bzr.dev 4452" rather than "1.17rc1".

That's very well put.

> In fact, I think providing better packaging, even if we need to
> initially invest time and energy to get there, will give us a
> better feedback overall because when we someone reports a bug in
> a given bzr/plugin combination and we (in bug comments) say:
> please try again with a newer version... some users are just
> fubared because they just can't upgrade their setup.

Full agreement from me on that. FWIW, I've kicked off a discussion on
better packaging for Windows on the new bzr-windows list. Here's the
post if you're interested:
https://lists.launchpad.net/bzr-windows/msg00002.html.

Ian C.