So currently our plan for Firefox 3.1 beta 3 seems (based on my
asking questions on IRC) to be to ship it about a week after
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=upvar2 lands.  We don't
seem to have any deadline for that.

I'm wondering how long we're willing to wait.  It seems to me that:

  (1) without Tracemonkey, we probably could have shipped 3.1
  (final) by now (or, if not now, within the next month), since
  other areas would have been under more pressure to finish sooner,
  and since some of the things we've been adding to the blocker list
  lately (in Layout, anyway) feel a lot more like 3.1.0.2 blockers
  than 3.1 blockers.

  (2) Our 3.1 release is currently slipping well into the gap
  between when we were expecting to ship 3.1 and ship 3.2.

I think there should be a limit to the amount we're willing to slip
3.1 to accomodate tracemonkey, and I think we should decide what
that limit is.

If the limit is more than a month out, I think we should consider
inserting an additional beta (to get testing on everything that's
landed since beta 2, which was over 2 months ago) and bumping most
of the current P1 blockers to blocks-last-beta blockers.

If there truly isn't a limit, then I think we're too early in the
cycle to be in a feature freeze, and we should open 3.1 up to new
features.  

But I think there really should be a limit:  I don't see why
Tracemonkey shipping for the first time in Firefox 3.1 in November
2009 is any better than Tracemonkey shipping for the first time in
Firefox 3.2 in November 2009, and I think we have a lot of other
good work in 3.1 that we should be getting into the hands of our
users.

-David

--
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/