Hi all,
Been talking on IRC just a minute ago about how to get from here to 1.5.0-rc1. In this mail I'd like to outline my thoughts for where to go next as well.
On IRC the consensus was that we'll need to release another beta before RC1; there was simply too much churn since the last beta to be sure things remained as stable as before (e.g. the move of the docroot I mailed about earlier). So, the idea is to do 1.5.0-beta5 tomorrow.
Then, John will build a new Docker image for that, with adjustments for the docroot. In the mean time, I continue on the installation and first-use documents which we want to have done *before* RC1, so they can be part of the testing and validation period.
Over the weekend John - and hopefully anybody else who has time and motivation - will be doing another run-through for his own processes to get a feel if we're now close enough to 1.5.0-rc1.
Then, if we do, the process (not timeline) toward RC1 looks like this, as far as I'm concerned:
* Before we release RC1, we create the 1.5 branch
* When we create the branch, 'master' becomes 1.6.0-dev
* The 1.5 branch will still report 1.5.0-dev, until we release 1.5.0 at which time it switches to 1.5.1-dev, exactly as we do now on 1.4
* All fixes need to be committed on 'master' before being ported to 1.5 -- at least as long as the code bases haven't diverged much
* Since there's more than enough infrastructure for testing on 1.5, PRs (fixes) which come with tests (where appropriate) will be handled with priority (at least by me)
* Let's try not to back port to 1.5 new functionalities which don't replace regressed functionalities from 1.3 or 1.4 (if they regressed from 1.2, well, that's 9 years ago -- just put the fix in 1.6; we can release 1.6 whenever we want...)
* Let's keep master close to 1.5 for as long as 1.5.0 hasn't been released