At this year's WineConf we again had good constructive discussions about the development process, and decided a number of things:
- Version numbering will change to a sligthly shorter scheme. The next stable release will be called 2.0. Stable release updates will follow the existing scheme: 2.0.1, 2.0.2, etc. For the developemnt branch we will drop the intermediate number: releases will be numbered 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. and the next stable release in late 2017 will be called 3.0.
- Code freeze for the 2.0 release will start after 1.9.24, in 3-4 weeks, with a final release targeted around the end of the year.
- Michael Stefaniuc has agreed to continue maintaining the stable branch, and will be in charge of the 2.0.x releases.
- Since it sometimes takes months for the stable release to get into distributions, we'll look into providing binary packages of the stable branch to make it easier for users to stay up to date.
- The default reported Windows version will be upgraded to Windows 7. This will be done on the development branch soon after 2.0 is released, so that we have the time to catch regressions and address them before the next stable release.
- To further the integration of WineHQ and Wine-Staging, we'll look into merging the Staging website into the Wine Wiki. We'll also merge the IRC channels, and encourage people to discuss Staging issues on #winehq and #winehackers, with #wine-staging being retired at some point.
- To make sure that no patch falls off the list unreviewed, we are going to implement a mechanism to automatically assign a reviewer from the MAINTAINERS pool when a patch has been in New state for a week without action.
- Since reviewers assigned at random may not always be comfortable with fully signing off on a patch, we discussed adding an Acked-by header as a weaker version of Signed-off-by. We finally decided that for now, an informal mail to wine-devel would be good enough. We may revisit that decision if a formal header makes automation easier.
I'm hoping that these improvements will make things better for everybody. As always, feedback is encouraged, especially from people who couldn't make it to WineConf. As we implement these changes, please let us know how we are doing, and where we can do better.