I wanted to let the release team know that the Evolution team has decided to move from a 6 to 12 month release schedule. This will begin with the Spring 2014 GNOME release.
The rationale for this is rooted in the fact that because the code base of the Evolution suite (including E-D-S and the Exchange extensions) is so large and our development team is so small, we can only realistically support one stable release branch at a time; currently that's gnome-3-8. We have found that not only would the development team like a longer development window for landing and testing large changes, but moreover the current practice of abandoning a supported branch every six months leaves our users in a perpetual game of catch-up, since even distros on a semi-annual schedule generally release several months after the GNOME release. The current situation is frustrating for everyone. The details of our plan is as follows: - Release 3.10 this fall and 3.12 next spring in sync with GNOME. - After the 3.12 release, move to an annual instead of semi-annual release schedule. We will sync up with GNOME's spring releases -- including the string change announcement and freeze periods leading up to the spring release -- and skip GNOME's fall release entirely. - Throughout the rest of the year we will make monthly releases of our stable and development branches on a more predictable schedule (1st Monday stable / 3rd Monday development, or something like that). - We'll continue with our current even/odd versioning scheme, which means Evolution versions will gradually fall behind GNOME. While this may cause some confusion in the short-term, it leaves open the option of resyncing with GNOME's semi-annual schedule and version number at some point in the future. This was discussed and approved within the Evolution team at GUADEC, and we've had a supportive response on our user mailing list. I'd appreciate any feedback from the release team. Matthew Barnes _______________________________________________ [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team Release-team lurker? Do NOT participate in discussions.
