Re: 8.4 release planning

> Our usual process *is* to try and circumvent our usual process. And I believe
> it will continue to be that way until we lower the incentive to lobby for
> circumvention.

I think Tom and Bruce have both pretty much stated that they're not
keen on a shorter release cycle, and they're the ones who would have
to do the work, so I think this argument is going nowhere. Moreover,
I agree with them. Having short release cycles would probably be a
good idea if we had a larger community with more patch authors, more
reviewers, and more committers. As it is, I think it would simply
mean that the committers would spend more time doing releases and
back-branch maintenance, and correspondingly less time to do what we
really want them to do: review and commit patches. That problem is
already pretty severe, and it would be a bad thing if it got worse.

If anyone really can't wait a year for a new feature, they can
backport it to the previous release, or pay the patch author to do it.
If they were paying the patch author to develop the feature in the
first place, it shouldn't be a horribly expensive proposition.

At the moment, what we really should be doing is conducting final
reviews of as many patches as possible and trying to make sure that
they are in good shape to be committed so that the people who have put
in hard work for THIS release have a chance to see that work go out
the door in a somewhat timely fashion.

...Robert