[VM] Release management strategy for VM

[Uday Reddy]

The last public release of VM (8.1.1) was in April, 2010.  So, we have 
had more than a year pass by before the next release.  And, it will take 
almost another year before it makes it through the pipeline of the Linux 
distributions.  That means that the bug fixes that I have made won't be 
available to the users at large for a long time.

If you look at the development tree at Launchpad

 https://launchpad.net/vm

you will find that I have started out well, maintaining a release branch 
for 8.1.x.  I scheduled an 8.1.2 release for some time in June/July 
2010, but it never happened.  It is to hard for me to maintain multiple 
branches, because all development gets its first stage of testing in my 
daily use and I can't use multiple versions in daily use.  The rest of 
our development team and the alpha-testers are all focused on the trunk. 
 They regularly download trunk and use it in daily use.  However, there 
is nobody that uses the release branch, as far as I am aware.

We can fix this problem if one of you can volunteer to be a 'release 
manager', who regularly uses the release branch, monitors the bug 
reports that come in, and ports and tests the bug fixes on the release 
branch.  You don't need to be an expert elisp programmer to do this. 
You just need to have some working knowledge of elisp and understand 
code well enough to see what fixes fit and what don't.

Even though we have called VM a "community project" after Kyle Jones's 
retirement, the community hasn't been particularly active.  Rob F did 
most of the work when he was active and then the burden fell on me. 
Launchpad is a great tool that allows large teams to participate and 
collaborate on maintaining software.  I think we haven't been exploiting 
it adequately.  So, this is a chance for the "community" to get involved.

Cheers,
Uday