R devel - Aug 2003 - 1.8.0 schedule

For the benefit of package maintainers (and others) we thought it
would be a good idea to publish the release schedule well ahead this
time. The plan follows below. Not everyone in R-core has had a chance
to complain, but I'm off to the ISI tomorrow, so I thought it had
better be done now. 

Platform testing has been a major problem with the previous releases.
For some reason, people with exotic platforms tended to report
problems just *after* the official release when we need to wait
several months before publishing a revised version. This happened even
though we had set a testing period of a total of three weeks,
dedicated to catching this kind of problem, but the only effect seems
to have been to leave developers blocked for the duration... This time
the feature freeze period will be shorter, but to compensate we plan
to release a series of alpha versions ahead of the feature freeze.

        Peter D.


And here's the schedule:

Aug 12:

    Announce schedule on R-devel

Sep 10:

    Declare start of release process. The build process is assumed to
    be essentially in place at this time.

    There is a "grand feature" freeze (minor tweaks can be applied,
    but no wholesale restructuring or API changes). Notice that
    wrapping a package in a namespace is a grand feature, and so is
    meddling with the event loop.

    Package maintainers should start adapting to any changes in base.

    Start making R-1.8.0alpha.tgz packages automatically available.

Sep 24:

    Feature freeze, simultaneously on base and recommended packages.
    It is assumed that all recommended packages pass their checks at
    this point. The API should not be touched.

    Start making R-1.8.0beta.tgz packages automatically available.


Oct 1:

    Code freeze. Only critical and/or trivial bugs fixed from this
    time onwards. Configure/make should only be touched in
    emergencies.


Oct 8:

    Release.


-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907

On 12 Aug 2003 22:05:59 +0200, Peter Dalgaard BSA
<p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk> wrote:

>Sep 10:
>
>    Declare start of release process. The build process is assumed to
>    be essentially in place at this time.
>
>    There is a "grand feature" freeze (minor tweaks can be
applied,
>    but no wholesale restructuring or API changes). Notice that
>    wrapping a package in a namespace is a grand feature, and so is
>    meddling with the event loop.
>
>    Package maintainers should start adapting to any changes in base.
>
>    Start making R-1.8.0alpha.tgz packages automatically available.
>
>Sep 24:
>
>    Feature freeze, simultaneously on base and recommended packages.
>    It is assumed that all recommended packages pass their checks at
>    this point. The API should not be touched.
>
>    Start making R-1.8.0beta.tgz packages automatically available.
If I hear no objections from CRAN I'll start putting binary builds in
the Windows download area.  They'll be called rw1080alpha.exe and
rw1080beta.exe, and won't be refreshed daily, but will be refreshed as
frequently as I can manage.

If this causes a bandwidth problem on CRAN or mirrors I'll revert to
putting them on my own web page
<http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/r-devel/>
as I currently do (irregularly) with development builds.

Duncan Murdoch