Time-based releases idea

[Scott Ritchie]

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2+months out of date Wine version or an untested one.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