[Banshee-List] Release management, and stepping it up to 3

[Bertrand Lorentz <bertrand lorentz gmail com>]

Hi everyone,

As you probably have noticed, we didn't have a release schedule for
the last 6 months and we didn't have any release since 2.6.0, back in
October. I'm to blame for that, and I'm sorry I haven't communicated
earlier about this.

Normally, now would be the time to put out a 2.8. But I don't think
there's enough enhancements in git master to justify a major release.
One of the reasons is that we have several big transitions ahead of us
(GTK# 3, GStreamer 1.0), and we've been laying the ground work for
those.

With this in mind, I'm proposing the following:
1/ Review all the fixes currently in git master, merge them in the
stable-2.6 branch as appropriate [1], and do a Banshee 2.6.1 bug-fix
release.
2/ Skip version 2.8.
3/ Banshee 3.0 will use GTK# 3 (thus depending on GTK+ 3.x and friends).
4/ Banshee 3.0 should use GStreamer 1.0, through our GStreamerSharp
backend. If not, this will be the objective for 3.2.
5/ Banshee 3.0 will be released "when it's ready", and should reach
for the same level of quality and stability than our previous stable
releases. It will of course be preceded by several development
releases and release candidates.

This means that we will abandon our time-based release schedule, at
least until the 3.0 stable release is out.

One of the reasons why the gtk3 branch hasn't been merged into git
master is that I was never sure we could get to a good-enough quality
before the next scheduled release. Not setting an arbitrary date for
Banshee 3.0 will allow us to work more serenely towards a high quality
release.

More than ever, we will need everybody's help to reach those goals:
coding, reviewing, building, testing, documenting, on Linux, OS X and
Windows.

So, what do you think ?

[1] https://live.gnome.org/Banshee/StableReleasesPolicy

--
Bertrand