Release schedule after release?

[Holly Bostick]

Looking at the current user docs raised a question as to how to update
the 'Getting Wine' section.

I know from the past that many users don't know that Wine has been up to
this point on a monthly release schedule. Between this ignorance, and binary
distributions' stable and unstable trees, the average user may frankly
be using 'any old version' (meaning, one cannot even hazard a guess as
to what the 'most likely version' they might have is, one has to ask
each user specifically) of Wine when they show up on wine-user with
questions.

So I find it important to document this and hopefully get everybody more
or less on the same page, as it were --or at least within a known range
of pages. Hopefully, for the release, we could count on that for a
limited time, since it is to be hoped that 'everyone' will upgrade to or
install that instead of some other previous beta.

But the docs, of course, have to be valid for the future as well as (to
a limited extent) the past. So how will one "Get Wine" after the
release? Will there continue to be monthly public betas? Or will the
release schedule change? Will the binary policy change? Meaning that the
public betas (if they still exist) will not be available in distribution
repositories, but Wine will now maintain its own stable and unstable
trees, and only releases will be available to the distro repositories?
Will there be different policies or levels of availability for different
distros (maybe a Knoppix user will be able to get the unstable beta
builds from Sid contrib, but a SuSE user won't)?

What should I tell the people?

Thanks for any guidance,
Holly

[Alexandre Julliard]

Holly Bostick  writes:
> But the docs, of course, have to be valid for the future as well as (to
> a limited extent) the past. So how will one "Get Wine" after the
> release? Will there continue to be monthly public betas? Or will the
> release schedule change? Will the binary policy change? Meaning that the
> public betas (if they still exist) will not be available in distribution
> repositories, but Wine will now maintain its own stable and unstable
> trees, and only releases will be available to the distro repositories?

Apart from the version numbering, it won't change much. There will
still be regular CVS snapshots (I'm hoping to do them more frequently
than in the past, but don't hold me to that ;-), and binary packages
built from these snapshots. I have no plans to create stable/unstable
branches, at least not until we reach 1.0.

[Ivan Leo Puoti]

Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Apart from the version numbering, it won't change much. There will
> still be regular CVS snapshots (I'm hoping to do them more frequently
> than in the past, but don't hold me to that ;-), and binary packages
> built from these snapshots. I have no plans to create stable/unstable
> branches, at least not until we reach 1.0.

How will the feature freeze/unfreeze work?

Ivan.

[Alexandre Julliard]

Ivan Leo Puoti  writes:
> How will the feature freeze/unfreeze work?

It's really a progressive process that has been going on for some time
now. As code matures I'm getting increasingly reluctant to accept
large changes to it, that's why I insist on small patches and test
cases for changes to areas like the wineserver, or the messaging code;
while for dlls that are still pretty much in prototype stage almost
anything can get in. So as we progress towards 1.0, more and more code
will get in a "frozen" state.

At some point we'll have to decide that some features need to be
postponed until after 1.0, but I don't think we are quite there
yet. At this point I don't see anything that is currently being worked
on that would be unacceptable for 0.9.x.