Please pardon the outsider intrusion. :)
While reading some of your discussions on releases I had this thought or perspective on timed releases.
Squeak is a rapidly advancing system. Because of this it can be challenging to pin down a release due to a particular feature set. Features, apps, products, etc. are constantly being added and evolving.
Maybe what is needed is merely a point in time where a 'snapshot' of the current development Squeak is stabilized. Similar to the Debian analogy. The more solid stuff moves up to become the stable snapshot and then stabilized for the timed release.
Somewhat as a natural part of this and open source development would be that what makes into into the stable release is that which has received the developer mindshare or attention.
This way the user community can keep up with current Squeak happenings while maintaining a relative sense of stability with their Squeak environment.
However the implementation takes place it just seemed that the idea of a Stable Squeak Snapshot (3 S's :) is what were looking at for a timed release schedule. I think it fits Squeak better than a feature based release schedule. Not that features are bad, but the trigger needs to be pulled somewhere. :)
Am I making sense here?
Thanks.
Jimmie Houchin
PS. I too, like the tri-annual release.