Relax the code freeze a bit and stay in RC phase for as many releases as the beta phase..?
That's like saying "don't do the 1.0 release yet, just keep doing 0.9.62, etc..." Not going to happen. Wine needs a release. All good open source projects need to release (not just make snapshots) periodically. Our last one was several years ago, and by doing a release, we are cleaning up a lot of bugs that have been lingering and annoying users for years. (Serial I/O, anyone? DOS apps?)
Sure, but doing a release on a unmovable schedule is also a mistake, imho; you want to release when you feel you have something of solid value. It should not be the case that a large block of conventional wisdom has it that 0.9.58 is 'better' than 1.0.
Obvious and large blocks of regressions are a valid show stopper, again imho.
But isn't this all just normal and expected? We had a big push by people to get features in prior to the freeze, so a lot of new features went in right before the freeze. Now we have to shake out the regressions and fix them. That process is a PITA, and usually takes a few weeks. Isn't that what we're doing?
Cheers,
Jeremy