Heads up: IcedTea6 1.4 is on the way

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Lillian,

On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 09:36 -0500, Lillian Angel wrote:
> I made the announcement that asked everyone to push their patches by 
> Thursday last week. Mattias said that he would need the weekend to do 
> testing, so I didn't end up creating the final tarballs until Monday to 
> include Gary's fixes as well. I thought it was clear the process I was 
> taking, and that we would need at least a week to do all the testing 
> before it gets pushed out. I am sorry if I was unclear.

Yeah, sorry. I was just looking at the top of the NEWS file which said
"1.4 (NOT_YET_RELEASED)", so I assumed it wasn't baked yet, which is why
I decided to update it (while waiting for some long and boring compiled
run). The other thing was that I saw Matthias regression bug:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=288
So I assumed things were still in progress.

> > It would be nice to at least update the NEWS file with the actual
> > release date (and hopefully all the new goodies that went in).
> >
> > Also including at least the list of regressions that Matthias noticed
> > would be nice (not necessarily in the NEWS file, but in the final
> > announcement if you sent it out).
> 
> I am not sure where to draw the line. It has been difficult to 
> coordinate all the testing, and I am afraid we are running short of time 
> and resources. Everything else has been put on the backburner to get 
> this tested and out. What are everyone else's thoughts?

For next time we should turn Gary's IcedTea release process thread into
a handy-dandy release process wiki page to make this more obvious. Also
to coordinate the testing and reporting issues a bit more. It will never
be easy to draw the line. Please do feel free to just say "this is the
process, and here the bug fixing stops". You are the person coordinating
the release, and someone has to make the call anyway. Next time the
process will be more clear and more familiar to all and hopefully it
will be easier.

Cheers,

Mark