Plans for next release
L. David Baron
aviary, but not cross-posting. Please direct replies to one list or the
other. ]
Some discussion among drivers and some of the Aviary project leads has
led to the following proposal for scheduling milestones up to the next
set of major releases. The proposal is to create a single branch from
which we will release Mozilla 1.8 and new releases of Firefox and
Thunderbird (perhaps called 1.1) around the same time.
* add a 6-week 1.8alpha5 cycle (freeze November 3, release about a week
later)
* add a 9-week 1.8alpha6 cycle (extra time to avoid holidays), during
(or before) which all the changes on the aviary branch that are not
on the trunk would land on the trunk (freeze January 5, release Suite
and probably some sort of Aviary alphas as well about a week later)
* add a 4-week or 5-week 1.8beta cycle (freeze February 2 or 9)
* release beta releases a week or two after the freeze
* make a 1.8 branch a week or so after the beta releases
* release a series of release candidates off of the 1.8 branch over the
following month or so, culminating in a Mozilla 1.8 release and
Firefox and Thunderbird releases.
One of the motivations behind this plan is the desire to ship releases
of all our products with a new stable Gecko version. It's been a while
since 1.7 branched, and, since then, there's been an unusually large
amount of Gecko work without a release of our flagship products.
We're interested in feedback on this plan. We're especially interested
in hearing from people planning major changes that would land during
this time frame and from people planning major changes for which this
schedule would cause problems. Note that it doesn't leave a lot of time
for major changes for the Aviary products between the 1.0 releases and
the freeze -- but that may be appropriate for a release that's more
about polish than big new features.
-David
--
L. David Baron <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
David
If you do finalize on this plan, then it would be a really good item to
amend it to the antiquated roadmap at:
http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html
Or possibly to the release-status at:
http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/release-status.html
Either way it should be put somewhere on the web so that people who
don't read the newsgroups have some idea of what the final plan is.
Adam Hauner
> schedule would cause problems. Note that it doesn't leave a lot of time
> for major changes for the Aviary products between the 1.0 releases and
> the freeze -- but that may be appropriate for a release that's more
> about polish than big new features.
More polished release would be fine. In our support forums user complain
about many small bugs in every release; situation in Bugzilla is same
(you all know comments like "hey, this bug has 4th birthday" or "we
don't block release for this"). And probably users are becoming sure,
that majority of these small bugs will be in next release too.
Best regards,
--
Adam Hauner
Projekt CZilla
http://www.czilla.cz/
Axel Hecht
going to port the l10n changes on aviary back on the trunk.
If there are going to be substantial changes, and it might be that there
are, having only a short time between 1.0 and 1.1 might be hazardous to
localisation efforts.
Axel
Kurt supernova_00
you say with so many changes to the engine and other things, why not
release 2.0? It seems to be a big leap from 1.7 to 1.8 so I feel it
deserves a 2.0 milestone release.
L. David Baron
Considering that there are about four months between now and the
proposed beta freeze, I'd expect it would be possible to land what's
already landed on the Aviary branch on the trunk before the beta freeze,
even if there are additional things that need to be done for it to land
on the trunk. How were you thinking it might be hazardous to
localization efforts?
Benjamin D. Smedberg
I am mainly concerned that there is no plan of action for the trunk, so
I cannot land the localizations changes on the trunk.
--BDS
Brendan Eich
The 2.0 designation is not based on feelings. See
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2004_06.html.
/be
Rickkins
Seems like an awful long time between 1.7 and 1.8. Why the seemingly
long delay...???
David
Everyone is busy working on Firefox and Thunderbird. Plus there was a
lack of features between some of the recent releases (such as 1.6 to
1.7) and adding Alphas was designed to stimulate more development
activity. Initially the plan only called for 2-3 Alphas, but now
Firefox-mania has pushed it to six or more Alpha releases (despite the
fact that download stats for Seamonkey Alpha releases have substantially
dwindled).
Rickkins
Speaking for myself, I use Mozilla suite for the rock solid stability
it brings to the table. Thus, I rarely grab betas, much less alphas.
That being saidm I certainly hope to see Mozilla suite continued to
be developed, as I can't stand Firefox.