[Owncloud] release schedule for next ownCloud release

[Frank Karlitschek]

Hi,

here comes the release schedule for the next major ownCloud release.

The challenge is that the major new feature of ownCloud 5 is the new encryption system which is not completely implemented yet.

I don´t want to push this feature into the release without proper testing because it could potentially eat your data if it has bugs. One of the lessons from the ownCloud 4 release is that we have to be more careful with potential dangerous features.
But we have implemented several smaller and stable features in master that deserve to be released.

Because of that I would like to do an ownCloud 4.5 intermediate release of master soon and an ownCloud 5 with the new encryption feature relatively fast afterwards.
Another thing that we have to do better this time is the QA.
Because of that we want to do a full 4 week of testing cycle with a feature freeze in place. 

This means that the schedule looks like this:

20.08.12 - Soft feature freeze. Last day to merge bigger features (Alpha 1)
28.08.12 - Hard feature freeze. Last day for feature commits. Only bugfixes are allowed from now on. (Beta 1)
03.09.12 - Beta 2
10.09.12 - RC 1 Only showstopper bugfixes are allowed from now on.
17.09.12 - RC 2
24.09.12 - Creation of final tar files and start of packaging.
26.09.12 - Announcement ownCloud 4.5


I hope this works for everybody.

 
Frank