So I think we have consensus around a few things already - lets highlight those:
* Time based releases * Versioning scheme: X.Y.Z - X : increases when there is a "major" change in architecture or some major new feature - Y : increases with every release every 6 month (reset when X increases) - Z : increases when there are "must fix bugs" or annoying bugs that get fixed in a release branch (reset when Y increases) ===== What we don't yet have consensus on ===== * What the time period is on releases * What the version number for the first Apache release should be (to be fair we haven't really discussed this.) So lets start with the easy one, the version number - should we target 3.1.0 or 4.0.0 or something else entirely? I could be swayed either way. On the release time period - as a packager for 20-30 packages in Fedora I am certainly sympathetic to release cycles, and realize that virtually all of the community distros (save Debian which is on a two year release cycle) are on a 6 month cycle. That said I don't know that we can necessarily be married to what the distros are doing. I also look at projects like subversion which are tossing out releases approximately every 60 days - and I don't see any distro that doesn't carry subversion (though admittedly very different projects in virtually every respect) I think every 3-4 months makes sense to me, but again that's just me - gives us a slightly faster iteration but hopefully not removing towards an unmanageable release cycle speed. Another question is - how long do we support any given release line......e.g. if I embark on 5.2.0 (completely made up version number, but assuming the above version scheme) how long will I be guaranteed bugfixes for 5.2.x. Perhaps it's too soon to even ask that question - we haven't even pushed a single release out, but something to think about. Thoughts, comments, flames? --David
