Re: New stable version after Sarge

[Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org>]

> A 6-month period honestly doesn't allow us much time for new development
> anyway.  If all we wanted was a point release of sarge, that'd be fine; but
> I think most people would like to see etch be an improvement over sarge in
> more respects than just hardware driver count, and we have to be realistic
> that this means a period of heavy changes followed by a period to stabilize
> everything again.

I mostly agree with this analysis. We could however give us a better
chance to reach this goal by putting a delay for the end of the "heavy
changes" period, immediately, instead of just open the gates again and
wait until someone feels it is time to think about the release..:-)

So, if we imagine we release sarge at February 1st (ahah), just
immediately announce that etch will enter the first freeze stages
(base packages frozen, testing-security checked, d-i frozen) on August
1st.

This will give all developers a good idea of the way they can organise
their work. So, even if respecting this schedule may be difficult, we
would probably give us better chances...