[Qgis-developer] Feature freeze commencing the ides of March

[Tim Sutton]

Hi All

I would like to get 2.0 release process rolling - I think all the key
features we were after have made their way into master and those that
haven't can probably wait for 2.1. Unless there is vigorous and
widespread objection, I propose that we embark on the following
release schedule:

15 March 2013 - Feature freeze - no new features in master
1 April 2013 - GUI Freeze and String freeze - no changes to ui or
strings except where required for critical bug fixes. Call for
translations.
1 June 2013 - Branch 2.0, code freeze (except for packaging related
changes), call for packaging
7 June 2013 - Public release of 2.0

The schedule basically allows for 3 months in order to work away the
~50 blockers in the bug queue.[1]

I appreciate there are some who will wish the release period is longer
and others who wish it was shorter, but we need to draw a line in the
sand somewhere and this schedule seems like a good place to draw it.

If you are in some way funding development of QGIS features (or
building them yourself), please bear in mind that the features being
developed for you will no longer be part of the nightly builds after
15 March unless they are already part of the 'master' code base at
that time.

Also if you have the financial resources to do so, please consider
hiring a developer to take care of one or more blocker issues so that
we can avoid extending the release deadline because of blockers. If
you take this path, please also ask your contractee to provide unit
tests for the fixes so that we can ensure that there are no
regressions in the future. As always donations to the project itself
to support fixing these blockers will be gratefully accepted - contact
Paolo Cavallini if you need more info, or visit our donations page[2].

To bug queue maintainers, could you please go through the blocker list
and carefully evaluate whether they should really be in the blocker
queue. IMHO a blocker should be a cross cutting issue (i.e. not
affecting a user base of 1 only) that causes QGIS to crash, corrupt
data or introduces a significant regression to existing functionality.

To documentors and translators - its probably a good time to start
encouraging your communities to get ready for 2.0 and start
translating / documenting new features.

[1] http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis/issues?query_id=23
[2] http://www.qgis.org/en/sponsorship.html

Regards

Tim

--
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
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