[Aptitude-devel] Development for Jessie

[Daniel Hartwig]

Hello

The Jessie freeze is scheduled for November.[1]  The follow process is
for development and continuous release of two main branches.

The pending interface and other disruptive changes are best released
on experimental, under the 0.7 development series.  This allows plenty
of room for adjusting things based on feedback, etc. without
disrupting the typical user of unstable.  Development of these changes
will be finalized no later than four months, which leaves three to
four months to test and polish on unstable.

Surely there will be non-disruptive changes, bug fixes and such, that
are suitable for unstable in this time.  A new branch stable-0.6 will
be created to handle updates on that series, with regular releases to
unstable.

For the next four months:
* master becomes 0.7, released to experimental;
* stable-0.6 handles minor changes, released to unstable;
* stable-0.6 is regularly merged to master to keep everything synchronized.

After four months, in early July:
* work on 0.7 is finalized and released to unstable as 0.8;
* stable-0.6 is no longer active;
* leaves four months for widespread testing, resolving issues, and
final polish without disruptive changes.

Such a process should accommodate all interests. Of course, use of
feature branches etc. will continue, with only complete changes being
merged to master or stable-0.6 (do not want 0.7 to be any more bumpy
than it needs to).

In terms of current wip:
* dth/remove-libept is for 0.6;
* wip-cmdline and dth/cachefile are 0.7 material.

Regards


[1] <https://release.debian.org/jessie/freeze_policy.html>