Dan Kegel wrote:
I just wrote up an idea related to release management for post-1.0 wine releases. It's online at http://wiki.winehq.org/TimeBasedReleases Essentially, the idea is to release in March and September, in time for the April and October releases of Ubuntu.
You have my 120% support for this. Although Ubuntu is certainly our biggest distribution, I'd like to stress that by targeting March and September, we're not just doing this for Ubuntu; we're doing it for every distro that is timed to release shortly after the bi-annual Gnome and X releases.
There is growing support for synchronizing distro release dates, not only for the above reason, but also to make Linux as a whole look good.
For instance, following this strategy, we might plan to release wine-1.2.0 in September 2008 or March 2009.
The alternative is to propose a set of criteria that wine-1.2 needs to meet, and working until they are met, which is what we did for wine-0.9 and wine-1.0 (I think; it's kind of hard to tell).
The alternative, truthfully, is choosing between shipping Ubuntu with a 2+months out of date Wine version or an untested one. Either option sucks.
Let's face it, we effectively have time-based releases now, since with the features-based model 1.0 kept getting pushed back for years and years. Now, that we've finally set a date, we're actually going to have one ;) I could be wrong, but I don't see any better dates to use than March and September, just in time for the release candidates to hit the betas of the upcoming distro releases.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie