Release plans?

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

I was hoping we could merge in the GUI into Savannah during August,
but I haven't gotten around to it. I see this as one of the most
user-visible changes for 3.6. I am hoping we can do it during
September to have it ready by October.

I thus propose the following release plan, which I informally already
communicated in IRC during the sprint:

    - Release one more bugfix version of the 3.4 series within a month
      (maybe two, but really aim for one).

    - Feature freeze on the development branch by October. That means
      that if you have a particular feature you really want in, you
      have one more month to finish it. My own wish is that we really
      get the GUI in there.

    - After the next 3.4.x release (prepended by an appropriate RC),
      which hopefully will happen by the beginning of October, we
      merge default to stable.

    - Spend the next two or three months stabilising the newly merged
      in stable branch, making beta RC releases every month or two. If
      desired, we still implement occasional new features in default,
      with the understanding that the real goal is to stabilise the
      stable branch.

    - Release Octave 3.6 around the December solstice, with a
      profiler, an experimental GUI (perhaps disabled by default at
      runtime but enabled at compile time, like we do right now with
      OpenGL) and the OpenGL plotting enabled by default, all very big
      user-visible features.

Part of the goal, I hope, is that we also allow time to catch up to
binary distributions and we don't announce the release until we are
pretty sure that binary distributions are all feasible. I'm very happy
to see Nitnit's work on Windows packaging, and I think it's very
important to make sure there's a good chance that binary packaging
will be ready by the time we announce a new major stable release or
very soon after.

I know the GUI right now has many problems, but we should work to make
it part of the next stable release. I will address those in another
email.

So how does this sound? Is this a workable plan? Any foreseeable
limitations?

- Jordi G. H.