Release management (Was: Re: What are the objectives for Xfce 4.4?)

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> Biju Chacko wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> For some reason, I seem to think that contributing a minuscule amount 
>> of code a very long time ago entitles me to pontificate about xfce. I 
>> probably have less right to talk than many others here, but xfce is a 
>> project that I care deeply about so I'll bore all of you with some of 
>> my ideas. Please bear with me. :-)
>>
>> IMHO, one of the reasons that we have such a long release schedule is 
>> because we don't have clear criteria for declaring that a release is 
>> ready.
>>
>> Basically, every now and then we start feeling that it's been a long 
>> time since we did a release. So then we feature freeze whatever is in 
>> CVS, stabilize it and then release.
>>
>> I don't think that it the right way to go.
>>
>> I think some of you may agree with me.
> 
> 
> The importance of when and what... I'm glad to see that you care about 
> this as well, but I'm afraid that your attempt will fail just like the 
> other previous attempts to get more `real world techniques' into Xfce... 
> but, hey, maybe this time we'll manage to handle it... lets see.
> 
>> Basically, we need to set some clear objectives. These objectives need 
>> to be achievable, and there should be a rough idea of how much work 
>> it's gonna take. We should decide which objectives should be delivered 
>> with which release.
> 
> 
> ACK.
> 
>> Once the all the objectives of the 4.4 release have been met, we 
>> should release.
> 
> 
> s/we should release/we should create the release branch/.
> 
>> I also feel that we should have unstable releases more often.
> 
> 
> ACK.
> 
[...]
> 
> * Elect a release manager for the 4.3 branch (and therefore for 4.4.0).
> 
> * Elect a maintainer for the 4.2 branch.
> 

Well, for elections we need candidates ;-) I have a feeling the main 
reason this doesn't really work for us, is that it takes a lot of effort 
and time to manage releases and none of us really has a lot of that 
available.

I was wondering what we could do to facilitate the job of a release 
manager. Maybe you have suggestions?

It is a hard problem for a project like ours to solve and I'm sure all 
of us are prepared to try out some ideas for improvements.

	Jasper