Proposed adjustments to our release cycles

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Friday 15 June 2012 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> 
> Opinions?

The predictability and synchronicity of our current six month release cycle 
has a lot of benefits. It allows all contributors as well as consumers of our 
releases to plan ahead and minimizes release overhead.

On the other hand it would be great to be able to release in a more agile way, 
if a sub-project is set up to handle this and is willing to put in the extra 
effort, so that users get new features and bug fixes quicker.

Allowing certain sub-projects to do their own schedule might be a good thing, 
and we already have seen that some components skipped releases, but I think 
it's still important that we have some common rhythm, which offers structure 
to our releases and community (some would call it cadence).

So I would really like to keep our release days as common integration and 
synchronization points, the six-monthly major release day, and the monthly 
minor release day.

That doesn't mean that all sub-projects have to release on this day. But it 
would continue to be an offer and default option for all those who want to 
benefit from a common and synchronized effort in terms of release management, 
translations, packaging, beta testing and all the other things which need to 
happen around a release.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>