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Cc: Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>, David Soria Parra <dsoria@gmx.net>
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Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:41:08 +0200
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Subject: Release Frequency, NEWS, etc.
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

Hi,

since 5.4.0 was released on March 1st we had 6 releases for 5.3 and 5.4
Basically following the mandate "At least one release per month, more at
wish" from the release process RFC[1] with some additional "emergency"
releases in between.

The synchrony between those two means that currently 5.3 is nice 10
releases ahead (5.3.15 and 5.4.5 were released together, 5.3.14 and
5.4.4 were etc.). This is nice as you can easily guess that a fix in
5.3.13 will be in 5.4.3, too.

Now such a fast, monthly cycle might be good for 5.4 but for 5.3 I think
we should slow it down. In my opinion we should try to promote 5.4 over
5.3, give mit more exclusive visibility. People who stay on 5.3 expect
to have a stable foundation, and aren't eager to check whether an update
is relevant to them that often, especially as most (all?) things fixed
in 5.3 are bugs which exist for a few years already. My expectation
therefore is that users spend less attention on these and therefore miss
critical fixes.

I would therefore like to reduce the 5.3 pace.

The current idea would be to skip every second release (unless security
issues demand something else) both in release date as well as version
number. So for instance 5.4.6 will be released sometime next month
alone. A month later there will be 5.3.17 and 5.4.7.

Doing this has an obvious issue, though: NEWS entries are currently only
placed in the lowest branch. With the example from above and the current
way the NEWS are handled 5.4.6 NEWS would be quite small and there would
be no 5.3 NEWS to check for further things.

Any comments on the general idea or suggestions for the NEWS thing?

johannes

[1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/releaseprocess