[Mono-dev] Mono 2.8 release plan. Developers: please read.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello guys,

     The time to release Mono 2.8 to the world if quickly approaching.
It is a feature packed release that changes many of the things that we
have been doing in the past.   The changes are significant and have the
potential to impact many applications, please familiarize yourself with
the current release notes draft here:

	http://mono-project.com/Release_Notes_Mono_2.8

     Mono 2.6 continues to be our long-term support release, so we will
continue to backport fixes here until we approach Mono 3.0.   

     This frees our hands a little bit, so instead of branching Mono 2.8
and backporting changes from HEAD to 2.8.xx and releasing bug fixes
every few months, we are going to get more aggressive with Mono 2.8 and
we will merely "snapshot" trunk and release 2.8.xx versions as merely
snapshots that have been tested.    This means that we will not be
backporting fixes to the 2.8 branch.   We will just fix, and a couple of
months later, do a new release from trunk.

     The idea is to reduce the amount of upfront QA that we will need to
do for the 3.0 release.   Ideally, 3.0 will just be a small incremental
update from the last 2.8.x release that we do, and it should have
received more day-to-day testing than nine months of behind the scenes
development.

     We will be doing a "preview" of Mono 2.8 called Mono 2.7 in the
next few days, and we will revise this rapidly so we should have Mono
2.8 finalized sometime in September.

Miguel