On Tuesday, July 27, 2004, at 06:07 AM, goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:

> "Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
>> Hi Doug,
>>
>> I think it is worthwhile for a number of ongoing projects to consider 
>> a very
>> short 3.8 cycle which basically pulls in the m17n stuff and no more. 
>> The
>> reason being that various projects do need a stable point of 
>> departure which
>> *does* include m17n and the changes are major enough that they will 
>> most
>> definitely need some time to shake down. I think we would be better 
>> off if
>> we basically go to beta straight away and maybe have another release 
>> two
>> months down the road than putting in (and waiting for!) "new stuff" 
>> and have
>> the next release only 6-8 month from now.
>
> Well, if the other Guides think this sounds reasonable - and the VM 
> port
> maintainers, then why not. We could instead focus on changing the
> development process during these months.

This sounds generally reasonable to me.  The one modification I'd make 
is that we should still allow the usual fixes and small 
enhancements/refactorings to be harvested from the BFAV during this 
release.  (There is already a backlog of approved items from 3.7beta.)  
This could happen after the m17n changes have gone in and are being 
tested, so it shouldn't significantly add to the time spent on the 
release.

However, we would not add any major enhancements (other than m17n) 
which have been discussed, such as splitting out a bunch of packages, 
major compiler changes, RegExp, Squat, etc.  Those could be lined up 
for the following release.

- Doug