Release schedule

[Hartmnt]

@Krzmbrzl I have seen you mention the release of the 1.5.x series multiple times now. How do you plan to handle this? Will there be (semi)-public release candidates before the final version? Since I worked on a lot of stuff for 1.5.x, I would love dogfooding my own changes so I can fix problems before a gazillion people already have it rolled out ;)

What about the accessibility patch series? It would be a shame, if they landed in 1.6 because they contain GUI changes.

Anything else you want to change about the Mumble release cycle?

[Krzmbrzl]

How do you plan to handle this? Will there be (semi)-public release candidates before the final version?

That is an excellent question. I don't know yet. Ideally, we'd have a release candidate beforehand, but this also comes with additional drawbacks:

• Requires extra work. Atm releasing a new version is a bit tedious and given how limited my time is anyway, I'm not quite sure I find the required extra time & motivation...
• If I understood correctly, Debian has another package freeze sometime in January. Thus, if we don't release before that, we get yet another Debian version with a totally outdated Mumble version (1.3.4). Given that I'll, probably only get to work on the release over Christmas, this might be a rather tight schedule to follow...

What about the accessibility patch series? It would be a shame, if they landed in 1.6 because they contain GUI changes.

I/We will definitely not wait for any particular PR to be merged. If it is merged before the release is drafted, fine, but if not 1.5 will be released without it. Waiting on individual (non-critical) PRs just introduces "release hell" where one waits on one PR after an other and therefore never releases.
For this particular PR though, we might consider backporting. Let's talk about that if it is needed.

Anything else you want to change about the Mumble release cycle?

I want to release Mumble versions much more frequently (~ every half year) and provide continuous nightly builds that serve as a replacement for release candidates. However, this requires reducing the overhead required to draft releases significantly (e.g. by automating most parts), but for this to happen someone will have to have the time to work on that.
So until further notice the release cycle will remain somewhat unsteady as is currently the case :/

[Krzmbrzl]

Update: I have reached out to the Debian package maintainer and was told that there is no announced package freeze for the upcoming Debian release yet. He estimated that we probably still have a couple of months until that such a freeze might occur.
With this time window in mind, I think we're going to release a 1.5 RC to test a while before we release 1.5 stable.

[Hartmnt]

I am not in any way affiliated with Debian, but this page https://release.debian.org/testing/freeze_policy.html seems to suggest the package freeze date is fixed at 2023-02-12. The "toolchain freeze" (which might be relevant to the cmake blocking issue?) is on 2023-01-12, which is the date that the one user mentioned in #5354