[IPython-dev] Victims of our own success, change of strategy needed to get 0.12 released...

[Fernando Perez]

Hi folks,

Since we have a fairly small team, I've always tried to avoid having
separate release branches, as that requires later merging those back
into the main development line and keeping for a while two truly
parallel lines of work.  Instead, we've tended to simply stabilize
master enough to release it and simply continue forward.

But that's just not going to work this time around: we're now victims
of our own success, and the stream of contributions is arriving faster
than we can safely merge them and see their impact for a release.
Serves us well for refactoring the code to be more modular, testable
and approachable, I guess :)

Now, I do *not* want to cut the enthusiastic contributions we're
getting, but we do need to have a period where we test a frozen
version on top of which we strictly apply *only fixes* and no actual
new code.  Basically we need to move to what many projects do already
with a release branch that is frozen while master continues evolving,
and 0.12 will released from that release branch.

So what I'd like to do is to triage, from our list of currently 16
open PRs, what do we actually want to go into 0.12.  After that list
is established, we'll try to merge *only those* and will create an
actual 0.12 branch to further stabilize them.  New PRs can be directed
to master, but those we'll either merge right away  (if they are done)
or we'll retarget them to a 0.12 branch we'll push to the main repo.

So let me know which ones you think are either nearly ready or
important enough to target them for 0.12, and we'll do this.

Cheers,

f