Hi all. It is with mixed emotions I hereby announce that the feature freeze for 3.0 is now lifted -- without 3.0 having been released.
We have been in freeze for over three months now. And we have indeed fixed many bugs, but we still have critical problems that prevent a 3.0 release. With summer in full swing and many core developers away on well-deserved holidays, it is impropable that these problems will be fixed before august, which would mean four months of freeze. A third of a year. That's not fun. I, Linus and Daniel discussed the freeze over lunch today and decided that in this difficult situation, we need to focus on the core values: Rockbox is about having fun. Being in freeze with no clear end in sight is a drain on morale and enthusiasm, which is not how we want Rockbox to feel. So we decided to end the freeze now and unlock the doors to creativity and programming joy. At best, we'll get lots of new improvements and exciting features without much negative impact. At worst, the changes will destabilize the code base severely and push the prospect of a 3.0 release even further into the future than today. In order to hedge our bets, we have set a tag in CVS which we can return to and branch from if we later fix the critical bugs and would like to release Rockbox in today's state. We still think the freeze was the right decision. We just weren't able to reach the state we wanted to, in the time we wanted to. And rather than stubbornly repeating "we freeze until release", we adapt to the current reality and unfreeze. Gentlemen, start your compilers. -- Björn
