[gmx-developers] Plans for release-2019

[Erik Lindahl]

Hi,

Based on discussions both in the team and at the Gromacs developer
conferences, we've converged to an early release schedule that we'd like to
share with everyone.

As we've all seen, it simply doesn't work to have feature targets for
releases, since that inevitably leads to slipping deadlines when we
underestimate both the implementation and review work.

Instead, this time we will try to have firm date-based targets and make
sure we put out the release late december. Based on that, we simply count
backwards to come up with deadlines for various other steps:


Oct 15: Release-2018 branch is created in Gerrit, and first beta.
Nov 1: Second beta
Nov 15: Third beta
Dec 1: rc1
Dec 15: (maybe) rc2
Dec 31: Release

These are the only really firm dates. However, it also means that any
significant change that should be in the release should not only have been
pushed to Gerri, but it must be *merged* by Oct 15.

It's likely that everyone will be quite busy the last few weeks. In the end
it is up to everyone to prioritise changes we want to go in, but if you
have stuff that you want to go in, you should likely plan to be a really
good Gerrit citizen and build karma by reviewing other changes :-)

And, in particular: For large changes touching lots of files, you should
plan that it can take months to go through review, so those should likely
be in review already late summer.

Finally, to facilitate the design review and reduce the amount of changes
required in code review, we've decided it's a good idea for any large
change to start with a Gerrit thread to discuss the design. That's not
*formally* required, but if you don't have it, you should expect to instead
get requests for large design changes during feedback :-)

Cheers,

Erik




-- 
Erik Lindahl <erik.lindahl at dbb.su.se>
Professor of Biophysics, Dept. Biochemistry & Biophysics, Stockholm
University
Science for Life Laboratory, Box 1031, 17121 Solna, Sweden
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