Hi,
I just want drop a note regarding development cycle. As long as developers are volunteers we can't plan development cycles like companies with similar deadlines. Therefore I want to suggest following ideas: - keep trunk always clean (no breakage, no freeze) - make/(re)define a strategy to create releases and merge back changes to trunk - split up between solutions and release-hackfixes - set effort of changes to create a release (release related additional changes) in relation to release cycle time - in general force continuous-integration-development like SCRUM-approach
We aren't enough developers for more sophisticated methods and to be honest we have (sometimes) to appear changes as bigger as they are. So we should apply KISS principle and follow the strategy to be able to make a release (almost) every time from trunk. For one of the next releases I suggest a "bug-fixing-only" release to wipe out the most annoying hackfixes and/or to reduce the bug list significantly. The system is quiet stable and we don't need to add new features in hasty manner. Maybe we can continue with applying waiting patches, or improve it for an integration.
Regarding the time frame, it's unimportant whether 3 months cycle or 6 months cycle, important for me is that we don't deviate from the cycle to much.
Best regards
Matthias