[cfe-dev] [3.9 Release] Release plan and call for testers

[Hans Wennborg via cfe-dev]

Hello everyone,

It's time to start planning for the 3.9 release.

Please let me know if you'd like to help providing binaries and
testing for your favourite platform.

I propose the following schedule:

- 18 July: Create the release branch; build and test RC1 soon thereafter.

- 1 August: Tag, build and test RC2. Any unfinished features need to
be turned off by now. As we get closer to the release, the bar for
merging patches rises.

- 22 August: Tag 3.9.0-final. The release ships when binaries are ready.


Also, I have three more questions for the community:

1) Right after the branch, the version number of the trunk will be
incremented. I assume this means bumping the major version number,
taking us to 4.0? IIUC, that's what happened after 1.9 and 2.9.

2) Following up on the May thread about the release process [1], I'd
like to make the schedule we've followed for the last few years more
official by posting somewhere on the web page that we're committed to
shipping two major releases per year: one in early March (branching
mid-January), and one early September (branching mid-July), usually
with one (or sometimes two) "dot" releases in between.

3) Another follow-up from that thread: it's usually the same people
who test the releases for their platform. Rather than asking everyone
each time, I'd like to make a list of who's responsible for each
platform and put that on the web page. Testers can still sign-up or
resign as they like, of course. Would you testers be OK with this?

Let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Hans


 [1]. http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-May/099541.html