[Mapserver-dev] 4.4 release plan

[Daniel Morissette]

Hi developers and documentation contributors,

We have started talking about a 4.4 release plan about a week ago but 
unfortunately didn't get much formal feedback. Most of you seem to 
silently agree with the plan, and most importantly there were no formal 
objections, so with this email I would like to officially initiate the 
4.4 release process.

First, I have created a new "MapServer Releases" section in the wiki:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?MapServerReleases
Over time I am hoping that we would better document the release process 
and include links to the relevant documents in there.

With respect to the 4.4 release, I have added the proposed 4.4 release 
plan in the wiki at:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleasePlan44

In previous discussions it was agreed that October 17th seemed like a 
good date for a feature/code freeze. Based on our experience with 4.2.0, 
we will plan for 3 betas over a 6 weeks period after the code freeze. 
This would lead us to a final release around end of November:

     * Feature/Code? freeze - October 17th
     * 4.4.0-beta1 - October 18-20
     * 4.4.0-beta2 - November 1st
     * 4.4.0-beta3 - November 15th
     * 4.4.0 (final) - November 29th (if beta3 has no critical bugs)

The items (new features or improvements) that are currently worked on 
are listed in the wiki page above, with the name of the person 
responsible for each. If you see your name there for some tasks then I 
would apreciate if you could update the information/status for your 
tasks. Note that the feature freeze means that our target is to have all 
tasks listed in the wiki completed by the code freeze date (except 
perhaps the review/addressing of all critical bugs). Is this a realistic 
target for everyone?

I have CC'd the mapserver-docs list to keep documentation contributors 
in the loop. Unfortunately we tend to forget about them too often, and 
this time I would like to involve them at the beginning of the process. 
I am hoping that Kari can coordinate with the various document owners to 
have the docs updated for 4.4.

The next step for me (and other developers) will be to walk through our 
respective list of open bugs and try to identify all bugs that are 
critical for 4.4. Those will be marked with the "4.4-release" target 
milestone. There is also a discussion in another thread on the -dev list 
about the way to handle bugs, so the way we tag bugs to be addressed in 
4.4 may change depending on the outcome of this discussion.

Okay, this is roughly what I propose. If anyone doesn't feel comfortable 
with that plan then please don't hesitate to speak up, but please do so 
ASAP so that we can better coordinate with everyone. Comments, 
suggestions, flames are welcome.

Regards

Daniel
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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