[gmx-developers] plans for GROMACS 2017 release cycle

[Mark Abraham]

Hi,

It's time to start preparing for this year's release. Consistent with
previous practice, we will have a soft deadline for work proposed for
inclusion to have appeared in Gerrit in approximately final form, then
we'll make a release candidate from the first patch on a new release-2017
branch. That branch will thereafter be open, in the usual way, for all
manner of fixes, docs and tests, with patches expected to focus on
stability, correctness and minimal disruption. Thereafter, from that
branch, we might make a future release candidate, and at some point a final
release.

For target dates I propose:
* April 1 - proposals available in gerrit in approximately final form
* May 1 - ship release candidate
* May 15 - ship second release candidate if that seems useful
* June 1 - ship 2017 final if there are no known serious problems

There's a fair bit of work currently in gerrit that is refactoring to suit
long term needs. There's no strong reason to push to get such things in the
release, but review and submission are welcome in the usual way. I do
suggest that we avoid any further cleanup patches that touch lots of lines
or lots of files until after the 2017 release, to make life easier on those
preparing work for that release and merging fixes forward.

After we ship 2017, and have incorporated any bug fixes we want to back
port, I will make a final 5.1 patch release and declare that branch closed
to future work. Similarly, I'll make another 2016 patch release, and
thereafter that branch will have the policy of being open only to fixes for
things that might affect scientific results.

My focus will be on the integration of Aleksei's PME-on-GPU implementation,
as well as several non-code GROMACS activities.

Erik hopes to rush out some new templated kernel infrastructure, but he has
a grant application on April 6, so perhaps we will relax the April 1 cutoff
for that - but based on history, there will be no promises either way ;-)

David's energy analysis framework is pretty close to good shape, so some
final effort there would be a nice achievement.

Berk hopes to get in some more of his conserved quantities for integrators,
and perhaps with Viveca some of the AWH implementation (that needs a lot of
refactoring, however...)

Are there any other things people would like to flag for attention? Are
there good reasons to suggest alternative dates?

Mark
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