Folks -

This is part two of two about upcoming releases. Besides the 4.0 release 
we need to get ready for a release from the trunk. If you look at rather 
long list of improvements this is a good time to get a release out.

One of the things that's a bit odd here is that we don't know yet 
whether the trunk release will become 3.11 or 4.1. That's because it 
depends on whether we can get the relicensing done before the trunk 
release is ready or not. If the 4.0 release happens relatively quickly, 
we can go straight to 4.1. However, at the board meeting we had 
agreement that we didn't want to introduce an artificial dependency 
here, so we'll be working towards 3.11 and if 4.0 gets done in time 
we'll just jump straight into 4.1.

To avoid confusion, let's refer to it as "trunk release" until we have 
more clarity of what version it is likely to be.

The real question is what remains to be done for the next release. In 
theory, we could just release a trunk image pretty much "as is" but from 
my perspective this is aiming too low. I'd like to make this a richer 
release than what a trunk image contains. To do this we'll have to find 
consensus about:
* what documentation to include
* what external/optional packages to include
* what the welcome screen should look like
* what extra projects to include
* ... and more ....
and that's besides the usual release work of ensuring that we've got the 
tests green, packaging Squeak for the platforms and so on.

I think what we're looking for here is really a release manager and team 
that think a bit like a product manager. We have a Squeak image and 
there's plenty of interesting code out there, what we need to do is to 
build an interesting AND useful artifact that we like as a starting 
point for people to explore Squeak.

I know some people have expressed interest in the release manager role 
for the next release (nudge, nudge Edgar :-) so again we need volunteers 
both for driving the process, decide on the deadlines, and get things 
done as well as team members for the various bits to be done.

Please don't be shy. If you'd like to actively participate in the next 
release, post your thoughts.

Cheers,
   - Andreas