[libvirt] Planning for next release and discussions on project process

So we are around the end of the month, i.e. the time where I usually come out and suggest to enter a freeze within a few days for the next release. However, looking at the git history I note that we have only around 125 patches commited since 0.8.7 was released and while I'm fairly convinced that time based releases are a really good thing (allowing people to see their patches out within a predictable delay, and allowing the whole ecosystem of distros/users to plan accordingly), it's also time I think to open up the process to the growing (or at least changing) set of people involved in building libvirt. I usually ask if everybody agrees on the next freeze but I have to make the initial selection based on the calendar and my own agenda (or Red Hat one). Other projects I know use things like weekly teleconferences to discuss ther development plans, or IRC meetings. My opinion is that phone is not alway convenient/eficient, IRC has the advantage of being more open (no spoken english barrier), less intrusive, and it's nearly trivial to extract and publish some kind of minutes. But both suffer from the timezone problem, basically if there is meeting time it's gonna be during insane hours for someone somewhere (we have a large set of developpers in the US, Matthias and Dan are in Europe, Justin is in Australia, I'm in China now and I think the Fujitsu developpers too) One possibility could be to use a mix of IRC channel gathering and an Etherpad file (very convenient tool try it), I just created one at http://ietherpad.com/oETnXKdcFf to try this out and put my own sugegstions, then others can come and put their own feedback even if they happen to not be online at the time of the meeting. To come back to the release, maybe we can do 2 release for Jan-Mar since we didn't released early in Jan and Feb is short, so I would suggest to plan a release before Feb 15, entering a freeze around the 7th Feb. This should allow to put in some of the code already reviewed but not yet commited that I spotted: + migration enhancements from Hu Tao and Wen Congyang + integration of locking in the QEmu driver from Dan + cgroup blkio support (lxc and qemu) from Gui Jianfeng + smartcard support from Eric but there is certainly things I forgot, and well people may have specific things they want in ASAP, so let's use IRC (irc.oftc.net #virt) and http://ietherpad.com/oETnXKdcFf and share opinions about next release and features to come, well unless people have a better idea on how to organize ourselves, Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ daniel(a)veillard.com | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/