[Qgis-developer] Release plans for QGIS 1.6

Tim Sutton lists at linfiniti.com
Fri Oct 15 19:42:54 EDT 2010


Dear QGIS developers

We (the PSC) recently received a threat of legal action against our
use of the word 'Tethys' in the naming of the 1.5 release of QGIS. It
seems that the word Tethys is trademarked by a company in one country.
Although we feel their case is weak, we do not have the time, money or
inclination to engage in a legal battle over this. The PSC has decided
not to disclose the name of the company since we a) don't want to give
them any free publicity and b) prefer that we handle communications
with the company through the PSC in a discrete and polite manner from
our side rather than via a public forum.

Thus we would like to put out QGIS 1.6 as soon as possible. We have
opted for doing the 1.6 release rather than just a rebadged 1.5.1
release in the interests of conservation of effort. I hate doing
'rush' releases as they have in the past been sloppy and less polished
than those where we take our time to check everything properly, but
circumstances beyond our control are dictating this one.

This has a few implications:

- The PSC has agreed to stop using planetary moons as the names for
our releases, and embark on a new theme of using extremely obscure
place names (e.g. the mythical Tweebuffelsmeteenskootgeskietfontein in
South Africa).
- We need to go into a feature freeze as soon as possible
- The 1.6 release that was planned for december 2010 will still go out
but as 1.7
- Once 1.6 goes out we will remove the download and references to the
release name of 1.5 from the web site.

So if you have updates / features / fixes in the pipeline that are
stable, please get them into svn trunk as soon as possible. I will put
out a more detailed timeline for the 1.6 hopefully over this weekend.

Lastly a special request, please add your suggestions to the wiki [1]
of your favourite and extremely obscure town or place for this
release. Translate 'obscure' to mean 'not used as a trademark or
product name' anywhere in the world. I will pick one based probably on
how nice the pic is and how catchy the placename sounds. In future
releases we can have a more democratic approach to selection of the
release name. e.g. some kind of voting system.

Best regards

Tim

[1] http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Release_Naming
-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
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