[Evolution] How would you feel about annual instead of semi-annual releases?

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

The Evolution team is considering moving from our traditional 6 month
release cycle to a 12 month release cycle starting next March, and is
soliciting feedback from the user community.

This is partly motivated by the team's desire for a longer development
window in which to merge and test major changes, but moreover it's to
provide better support to the user community.

The team's manpower is still severely limited to where we can only
realistically support one stable branch at a time and still manage to
get any kind of significant development work done for the next major
release.

The problem is -- even for distros that also make semi-annual releases
like Fedora and Ubuntu -- because of the lag between an upstream release
and a distro release, users are often upgrading to an Evolution release
that's either near the end of its upstream support window or is already
abandoned by developers.

That's frustrating for everyone.  Developers want everyone using the
latest (and in our opinion, best) release, and users don't like waiting
until their next distro upgrade to get their Evolution issues resolved.

So to compensate, the proposal is basically to make a major release
annually instead of semi-annually, and to support each release for 12
months instead of 6.  That gives users a better chance to sync up with
developers for at least half the year, and hopefully get their issues
resolved quicker.

We intend to synchronize our annual major release with GNOME's spring
release, and continue releasing stable updates and development snap-
shots throughout the year at the same pace as we do currently: about
once a month for each branch.  So we'll still hold to the "release
early, release often" principle.

You can peek at the developer thread on this starting from here:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-hackers/2013-July/msg00004.html

There seems to be a consensus in favor of this policy change on the
developer side, although we're still working out the finer details of
scheduling, versioning, etc.

What do you guys think?  Would this be helpful?

Matthew Barnes