[Qemu-devel] [RFC] Planning for 1.0 (and freezing the master branch)

[Anthony Liguori]

Hi,

I've posted an initial proposal for the 1.0 release on the wiki[1].

The release would be targeted for December 1st.  Unlike previous 
releases, I'm proposing that instead of forking master into a stable 
branch and releasing from there, we stop taking features into master and 
all work on stablizing master.

Historically, we forked stable for the releases simply because it was 
the least intrusive way to get us on a somewhat reasonable release 
schedule.  I think especially since we're targeting a 1.0, we're ready 
to get a bit more serious about releases.

I see the following advantages in using master for releases:

1) All maintainers are participating in the process which means releases 
are much less likely to be delayed due to lack of time from a single person.

2) Everyone (contributors) are forced to focus on stability which should 
improve the release's quality.

3) Feature development can still happen in maintainers trees.  I think 
this is an important step to moving to a merge-window based development 
model which I think will be our best way to scale long term.

Obviously, this will only work well if all the maintainers participate 
so I'd really like to hear what everyone thinks about this.

[1] http://wiki.qemu.org/Planning/1.0

Regards,

Anthony Liguori