release coordination and ATK

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

What I'm planning to do for the GTK+/Glib/Pango release is:

Thursday (2/28): 
 
  - Bump the version numbers to the versions:

  GTK+-2.0.0
  Pango-1.0.0
  GTK+-2.0.0

Friday (3/1): 

  - make candidate tarballs

      make distcheck distdir="gtk+-rc1-2.0.0". 
 
    [ The ordering here is to avoid version number comparison problems with the final
    tarballs. ]
  - announce them on the GTK+ lists.
  - declare the tree locked over the weekend, invite people to
    submit patches and bug reports in bugzilla

Monday (3/4):

  - apply any obviously correct and non-harmful patches. (Yes,
    this is sort of fudging the "release candidate" idea, but
    I suspect that something will show up that it would be
    silly not to apply.)
  - if there are no show-stopper bugs or major patches that have
    to be applied, make distcheck again with the final version numbers 
    and announce the release.
  - if we have non-trivial changes, fix them, make rc2 tarballs and
    try again on Tuesday.

Changing version numbers and generating tarballs won't be a lot of work, 
so I can easily extend things to cover ATK at the same time. (I assume 
that the release will be Atk-1.0.0?)

What will be a lot of work is writing release announcements. What
I want to do do is one release announcement for each library covering:

 - What does the library do
 - What's new since the last stable release (in gross outline)
 - Where do you download the library?
 - Where do you get information about dependencies and installation?
   (I'd like to have a single installation guide for the entire
   set of libraries.)   

 - acknowledgements (sticky area, I'd like to just acknowledge everyone
   in the ChangeLog, but extracting all the names from 30,000 lines
   of ChangeLog for GTK+ is a very daunting task. Acknowledging only
   "major" contributors is hard in a different way -- where do
   you draw the line?)

Then one "quasi-press-release" that covers:

 - What's all this about
 - What's exciting about the new release
 - Where do you go for more information. 

And links to the other detailed announcements.

I'd certainly appreciate if someone from the accesibility team would
write the announcement for ATK. (And wouldn't mind if anybody wanted
to help out with the other release announcements.)

Regards,
                                        Owen