Giovanni Corriga wrote:
>> And how long have we been waiting on 3.9?  I'd much rather see a timely
>> release every 6 months that includes what's already been done, than wait
>> forever for a release that has a list of "want to have's".
> 
> But on the other hand "what's already been done" may be more than what
> it would be possible to integrate in a six months cycle. And that would
> force use to make a release plan.

I don't really buy that. Anything that takes longer than a month to 
integrate is probably not "done" in any reasonable interpretation of the 
word. There may be things which take time to update but this could be 
handled by simply agreeing that for one or two versions there will be no 
significant changes in particular areas of interest. However, if you 
look at the release schedule that I posted you'd have two months (the 
discussion phase) to figure out whether you can integrate your code 
within two months (the alpha phase). I think that is *plenty* of time 
for both, catching up with the latest changes as well as actually 
integrating it.

 From my point of view the two months alpha phase is merely an 
adjustment for the volunteering effort - otherwise I would have said 
that within a week all of the changes should be posted. And that is 
already adjusted for people in different time zones ;-) Seriously, when 
I say "integrate it" what I mean is "load the latest version from your 
repository and expect it to work". Otherwise I wouldn't consider your 
stuff "done" and then the beta phase is mostly about fixing the bugs 
that happened because you were integrating stuff from different sources.

This might explain a little better what I mean by saying "only stuff 
that is done already" and why the phases have the length that I proposed.

Cheers,
   - Andreas