Hi, first of all I would like to volunteer again as release manager for our next release if it's ok for our community.
Second I would like to define with you what our next release will be. After various discussion and activities on the mailing list and also at the ApacheCon, I got the impression that the majority would support a 4.0 version as our next release. We are planning some bigger UI changes for the next release (sidebar) and such UI changes are always a good indicator for a new major release to signal our users bigger changers. I know Ariel has also some incompatible changes regarding add-ons in the pipeline that would also fit in a major release. I noticed some discussion around a new visual design and a bigger rebranding and this is a further reason for a major release. I think it is time to define this more concrete and focus in more detail on the work that is needed and required to bring a good and stable release on the road. Our goal should be to continue the success of 3.4 and 3.4.1. If nobody will complain I will start to merge the started 3.5 and 4.0 planning into one combined planning later. I believe it is important that we concentrate on our next release. If you think a rebranding is important and you want to drive it, please start immediately. If you want to bring in some new features, please communicate it on the list and start working on it. Let us work on the plan for the next release in an open and transparent way. Besides the next major release we should also continue the discussion on further language packs based on 3.4.1 to make the latest translations available as soon as possible. One way to make these language packs available would be to integrate the new translations on the AOO34 branch, build the language packs and a new source release based on this revision. The effort should be minimal as long as we don't integrate bugfixes. On the other hand a release is of course a lot of work and we can focus on releasing these new languages together with 4.0. The question is if we do have the resources for releasing the new languages? Any opinions or feedback? Juergen
