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This describes how releases are planned and scheduled, and where users of GLib can look to see what the current (loose) roadmap is. Signed-off-by: Philip Withnall <pwithnall@endlessos.org>
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Roadmap
The roadmap for development of GLib in upcoming releases is tracked in GitLab, using its milestones feature. Look on the upcoming milestones to see what features and fixes are planned for each release.
An issue being assigned to a milestone is no guarantee that it will actually be fixed in time for that milestone. Milestones are a rough prioritisation system for work, but GLib is a volunteer project with no fixed resources, so no guarantees can be given.
All releases are time-based rather than feature-based, as the development and stable branches of GLib should always be in a releasable state. Sometimes, at the discretion of the maintainers, a release may be held for a week or so in order to allow a particular merge request to land so that it can be made available to distributions or testers more rapidly.
When making a release, all remaining issues and merge requests allocated to the milestone for that release should be fixed (potentially delaying the release), or rescheduled to a different release, based on the maintainers’ assessment.
Unstable release planning
At the start of a development cycle, milestones are created for each release in the cycle according to the GNOME release schedule. GLib roughly follows the GNOME release schedule, but makes its releases one or two weeks ahead of each corresponding GNOME release. This allows other GNOME modules to depend on the correct GLib version for new APIs. GLib does not follow the GNOME module versioning scheme.
As the milestones are created, maintainers will assign issues to them, based on what they think is possible to achieve for each milestone given the amount of developer time available before the release.
Issues affecting a lot of users (such as common crashes), and new features which maintainers think will have a wide benefit are prioritised.
As a development cycle progresses, some of the releases are timed to coincide with GNOME’s API/feature, string and hard code freezes. Issues which add API and features are scheduled for the earlier micro releases in a development cycle, followed by issues which add or change translatable strings, followed by smaller bug fixes, documentation and unit test updates.
Stable release planning
Stable micro releases are scheduled at a cadence picked by maintainers, depending on the rate at which bugs are being found in that stable branch. More bugs leads to a more frequent release cadence.
Historically, the rate of releases on each stable branch has decreased inversely proportionally to the time since the initial release of that branch.
There is no limit on the number of micro releases in a stable release series. Typically there will be around 6. Micro releases stop once there are no more bugs found in a stable series, or once a new stable series supercedes it.
The milestone for the next micro release in a stable series is created when the previous micro release is made, such that only one stable micro release is scheduled at any time.