[gmx-developers] Release deadlines

[Erik Lindahl]

Hi,

We’ve been dragging out the release far too long, but that is about to change so we get it out before the end of the year.

One thing we've realized is that the release naming is bad because we end up doing releases like 2016.3 in 2017.

Instead, this is a good opportunity to change the cycle and call this release Gromacs-2018, do it BEFORE the end of the year, and then have a few 2018.x releases all made during 2018.

However, to make this happen we can't keep waiting for additional changes, because that in turn causes us to add even more stuff, and then we keep delaying.

Thus, while we HOPE to get E.g. PME-on-GPUs in the next few days, that might not happen since we'll now be firm with the date rather than feature-driven deadlines.

We're planning the first beta for Nov 22. after that the release will be branched off and *NOTHING* that isn't a bug fix will be allowed. We will follow that with a (hopefully) fairly rapid beta cycle.

However, in particular the next few days we want Gerrit to stay focused on the things that we absolutely need for the release. If you are uploading such a patch, explain in the first comment why it HAS to be in the release. 

Cheers,

Erik



--
Erik Lindahl <erik.lindahl at scilifelab.se>
Professor of Biophysics
Science for Life Laboratory
Stockholm University & KTH
Office (SciLifeLab): +46 8 524 81567
Cell (Sweden): +46 73 4618050
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