Hello all!

As a general rule, the Guides would like to keep the community informed 
about upcoming plans for Squeak releases.

So with that in mind, here is the release plan for 3.5, which was 
recently finalized on the SqF list:

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The 3.5 release will be a short release for the purpose of fixing a 
couple of serious bugs that have cropped up.  The idea is that we'd 
like to have a clean release as a base for everyone to work from, 
before we begin destabilizing things in 3.6 by pulling out parts of the 
image into packages.  And to a lesser extent, 3.5 will serve as a 
simple first-time release for the Guides, from beginning to end.

The proposed release date is April 4th.  This will give us a chance to 
get a release out quickly with these important fixes, and it will also 
give us a little bit of time to plan the 3.6 release.

The two fixes are the MetaClassBuilderFix from Andreas Raab which fixes 
the class builder problem, and a fix for saving and loading projects 
containing .gifs or .jpgs, posted earlier today by Ned Konz.

There won't be any other fixes accepted for this quick release, unless 
something comes up of similar severity to the project-saving bug.  
(Minimum requirements would be:  Several people independently bring it 
up as a problem, the bug didn't exist in 3.2, and then the guides have 
to agree that it's worth including.)  The reason we are being strict 
about this is because of the very short release cycle.

However, this doesn't mean that the harvesting process started up at 
http://swiki.gsug.org:8080/SQFIXES/ will come to a standstill.  Next 
week a 3.6alpha update stream will open up, and we can start moving 
fixes into it quickly.  3.6 will have a longer, more normal release 
cycle.

Because 3.5 is such a short release with few changes, we probably won't 
require that new VMs be created for 3.5.

Craig Latta suggested a "First Fridays" scheme for the final 3.5 
release date, which we will try here.  (Releasing on the first Friday 
of the month.)  That way we won't sometimes be releasing on a weekend, 
for example, which can be a problem for some people.

Dates:
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Sometime tomorrow or so - Add the two fixes to the 3.5alpha update 
stream.

Monday, March 17 - Move 3.5 to beta, and create a 3.6alpha update 
stream.  The update stream will include the usual choice to proceed to 
3.5beta, or to jump to 3.6alpha.

Friday, March 28 - Create a 3.5gammaOne candidate image.  Also, have a 
plan for the 3.6 release ready by this date.  The plan should include a 
proposed list of major features, and a release date.

Wednesday, April 2 - If the 3.5gammaOne image is okay, move image to 
final. Otherwise, create gammaTwo and delay one week. (Not likely with 
this particular release, but this will be the general rule.)

Friday, April 4 - Release!  Bundles are uploaded to the ftp site, and 
squeak.org is updated.



- Doug Way