> A 6-month period honestly doesn't allow us much time for new development > anyway. If all we wanted was a point release of sarge, that'd be fine; but > I think most people would like to see etch be an improvement over sarge in > more respects than just hardware driver count, and we have to be realistic > that this means a period of heavy changes followed by a period to stabilize > everything again.
I mostly agree with this analysis. We could however give us a better chance to reach this goal by putting a delay for the end of the "heavy changes" period, immediately, instead of just open the gates again and wait until someone feels it is time to think about the release..:-) So, if we imagine we release sarge at February 1st (ahah), just immediately announce that etch will enter the first freeze stages (base packages frozen, testing-security checked, d-i frozen) on August 1st. This will give all developers a good idea of the way they can organise their work. So, even if respecting this schedule may be difficult, we would probably give us better chances...