[Mono-list] Mono release cycle, updates.

[Miguel de Icaza]

    With Mono 2.8 out the door, I wanted to share with everyone our
plans for the upcoming releases and our existing releases.

    We will continue to push versions of Mono 2.6 to introduce bug
fixes, any security patches and backport subsystems like WCF, MSBuild
and LINQ to SQL which were mostly developed as part of our trunk work.

   With 2.8 we are going to take a different approach: we will backport
critical fixes and security fixes to the 2.8 branch and out of this
branch we will publish Mono 2.8.1, 2.8.2 and so on, but the only purpose
is to fix critical bugs and security problems.   If the bug is not
critical, we will not backport a fix.

   What we want to do is to make the 2.8.xx series a short-lived one,
with the majority of the new features and normal and minor bug fixes
going directly into master, and doing a release based on master that we
will call 2.10 in some 2-3 months.   We want to avoid going for a whole
year without doing a new release.

   This same process will continue after 2.10 until we feel that the
release is solid enough and that any of the potential regressions
introduced in the 2.6->2.8 cycle are fixed and we are ready to bless the
release with the 3.0 number.

   As for the main theme for 3.0, this is what we have in mind:

	* CoreCLR security available for anyone, not just Moonlight
	* SGen becomes the default GC
	* Tail-call optimizations for F# at least on x86, x86-64
	* Complete 4.0 API support (we are still missing a few bits)
	* New IKVM powered Reflection C# compiler
	* Unified PFx and ThreadPool pool management
	* WCF 4.0
	* Precise GC on registers/stack

   Although these are some of the "themes", there are other important
tasks that will take place in the meantime that are part of these
efforts and that will try to fit in, like profiling tools, a simpler
embedding API, stronger ABC-removal, bug fixing, better compatibility
with the CLR using Microsoft's test suite and so on.   These tasks will
get done at their own pace and they might end up in 3.0 if they are
completed in time, if not, they will show up at some later point. 

Miguel.