Four! was Re: Two major releases per year instead of three

[Mads Kiilerich]

Daniel Carrera wrote, On 08/04/2011 08:59 PM:
> On 08/04/2011 08:34 PM, Matt Mackall wrote:
>> So I've actually been thinking of switching to 3 month cycles after 2.0.
>> That would give us major releases on Nov 1, Feb 1, May 1, and Aug 1.
>> This would also align better with the 6-month release cycles of Ubuntu
>> and Fedora.
>
> Not that my opinion matters, but I'm always happy when release cycles 
> line up. I think the Free Software world should move in that direction.
>
> FYI, the release cycle for Ubuntu is Apr 1 and Oct 1. With the above 
> proposed release cycle, Ubuntu would ship with a 2-month-old version 
> of Mercurial.
>
> Fedora does not seem to have a rigid release cycle, but in practice 
> they seem to fall in May and November. So, realistically, they would 
> ship with a 3-month-old version of Mercurial.

"The bi-annual targeted release dates are May Day (May 1st) and 
Halloween (October 31)" ( 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Life_Cycle )

The freeze is 2 months before that, but stable fixes can always be 
pushed anyway, and Mercurial _is_ very stable ... at least in the way 
that it rarely introduces new bugs or behaviour changes and can't 
influence the overall system stability.

The lack of stable API (as used by extensions and TortoiseHg) do however 
mean that it isn't a good idea to push new Mercurial releases 
(especially not major releases) as updates to released stable OS 
releases. It might thus be an advantage that the major release has 
stabilized even more in minor releases and extensions have caught up.

/Mads