Sorry it's taken me so long to reply. I'm just replying to this thread randomly at the end, since there are things I want to mention from each of the previous replies. First, my original rationale while proposing a release schedule: there are too many players that I'd like to keep happy, including Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME and KDE. A 4 month release cycle means that picking up the most recent release will never gives each project/distro a version that's too stale (<=4 months) to depend on, and we don't have to tie ourselves to any other project's release schedule. This is why I'd rather have 4 months from release date to release date, and work harder at trying to keep within that schedule (i.e., I stick by the September release I proposed). On the other hand, I'm not keen on doing less than 4 months between releases. A shorter release cycle means there is a smaller "merge window" to pull in patches and test, and (debatably) more time in freezes. IMHO, 4 months allows us to strike a balance between release often, and leave enough time to merge big patch sets, test and be reasonably confident that they work well. Now as for how do we decide release blockers -- it's really a judgement call between all of us, and I think we've done a good job on 1.0 and 2.0. For feature blockers that don't look like they'll be completed, we just drop blocker status. For bugs and regressions, we fix them. Every crasher is not a blocker -- there are cases where we have no means of reproducing some crashers, in which case blocking on those would be silly. Finally, David (and all other distro folks) -- we've been pretty open to doing point releases with stability fixes if required. So if you think having one would be good, just bring it up. It isn't too hard to roll these out, and if it makes people's lives simpler, I'm all for it. If not explicitly requested, the idea is that we'll only make them for regressions or major bugs in a x.0 release. I hope I've addressed all the questions that came up on the thread, and I promise to reply to your replies a lot sooner than this took. :) -- Arun
