[Mono-list] Life after Mono 1.2

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

    Mono 1.2 is quickly approaching as the bug count in Mono's
Windows.Forms is closing.   But we are aware that there will be likely
bugs in the Winforms implementation that we are not aware of, and that
we will be shipping a series of 1.2.1, 1.2.2 releases to address the
issues as people use it on larger settings and larger applications. 

    For the next couple of months after Mono 1.2 is released, we will
likely not do a forked branch of Mono because this would increase our
maintenance overhead.   I would like to do the same thing that the
kernel folks are doing for a while: keep the "trunk" as stable as
possible and issue the 1.2.xx releases from trunk and not from a 1-2
branch for a few releases, probably two or three (which in Mono-terms
means 3 to 4 months).

    This means that for 3-4 months after Mono 1.2 we would not land any
of the large refactoring work into the main branch (in particular am
thinking of the new linear-il branch, and the new register allocator).
I know that this is a little bit painful, but it means that we will have
a more solid set of 1.2 releases (by not having to backport every change
we do).

    We will branch though, but it will likely have to be done in
February. 

Miguel.