Wesnoth1.6ReleasePlan

Outline for Wesnoth 1.6 release schedule

23 November - today
7 December - soft string freeze for everything
14 December - feature freeze
Christmas - hard string freeze for everything
beginning/middle of January - first RC of 1.6
middle of Febuary (around FOSDEM 09) - release of 1.6
in between - a development/beta release every two to three weeks

The schedule in detail

Today

All campaigns, the tutorial and -units under a soft string freeze. This means in those areas only spelling-, grammar- and bug-fixes should happen.

December 7th

Start of the soft string freeze for everything that is not yet frozen.

From 23 November to 14 December

Implement your features you would like to get in 1.6 and enter which bugs you want to / plan to fix. If you want a delay on the freeze, tell it Ivanovic. Make sure that the strings you need are already in by December, 7th. After the start of this feature freeze no new features should be added no matter if c++ code or WML.Every change from now on should be "bugfix and balancing only".

Keep in mind that all features added late in the process should be basically working in a nice way, that is no "dummy features" where the pseudo feature is said to be there but it is "just broken". If you need an extension of the time till the feature freeze, explicitly ask Ivanovic for it!

around Christmas

Merge of the spelling and grammar mistakes into trunk and start of the hard string freeze. No more string changes from now on.

beginning/middle of January

Release of the first release candidate for 1.6.

It should basically be working nicely, but needs some *real* testing. From this release on there should be no more changes that break compatibility between releases (eg unit balancing and stuff like this) so that the RC versions and the final stable line are compatible on the MP server.

Beside this the release announcement for 1.6 has to be written. It can maybe be modeled after the 1.4 announcement which was really well done. And we need lots of screenshots to be created so that we got something to show off together with the new stable release.

beginning/middle of Febuary

Tagging 1.6 and branching it into branches/1.6 once we are sure that the quality level we want to achieve is met. This is not before FOSDEM 09 and at least four weeks after the release of the first RC so that there is enough time for it to be really well tested.

Three or four days later

Big announcement of 1.6/party in IRC/holidays/whatever.

All time in between

Work on the bugs and test as much as possible to find the bad bugs. If you find any that should be blockers for 1.6, list them here.

Collect spelling mistakes in the wiki, so that we can fix them in a big batch, which is a little easier for translators. A development/beta release will have to be released every two to three weeks.