[Gnash-dev] release cycle

[Bastiaan Jacques]

Hi,

I'm proposing that we change our release cycle from six months to three
months. There are a few reasons why I think this is necessary:

* Our current cycle takes so long that various distributions end up
shipping CVS snapshots. It should be obvious that this is a less than
ideal situation that takes some of our resources.
* A lot of distributions also have a six month release cycle. So for
them, shipping a Gnash release is a hit-or-miss.
* Releasing more often will force us to streamline our release process.
In the past, we have frequently pushed back the release for various
reasons; this is something we want to avoid in the future.
* In order to maintain public interest in Gnash, a short release cycle
is desirable. With a three month cycle, we can avoid questions like "Has
your project died?".

On the other side, I can see a reason why we'd want to keep the cycle at
its current length. Namely, releasing costs developer resources. I think
we can avoid a lot of this cost by the aforementioned streamlining. This
can be done, to name two examples, by strictly adhering to deadlines
(I have volunteered for this job) and by automating things. Rob has been
working on the automation a lot already, by setting up a build farm
which will do things like automated testsuite runs and like producing
test builds with various configurations.

Opinions are welcome.

Bastiaan