- It took about 3 months from the start of the discussions (April, 28th) to release (July, 1st/13th).
- Translations of the application started May, 11th and ended May, 24th, so two weeks.
- Release notes where started already in February viewtopic.php?f=21&t=5667
- Translation of the release notes started around May 25th, which coincides with the end of the application translation window. This is actually a good idea, as sometimes during translation of the GUI one finds things that changed and should go into the release notes. Plus the translators have only one task to focus on at a time.
- About a week before the release (June, 25th) a date for the release was fixed and release candidate builds started to trickle in
- Release happened on 1st of July
- A bug fixed version was uploaded on 13th of July
Then I would like to throw in a few ideas for discussion:
This thread became the central place to discuss everything related to the release. I think it is a good idea to create such a thread for each release to have a place to discuss. In fact that could be the official start signal for the release preparation.
A significant part of the discussions in this thread was about what to include and what to leave for later. I would propose to put this at the beginning of the release process. So start by sorting out the branches, pull requests and issues on mantis that have accumulated, and assign them to this or a later release.
There were quite a few problems found after July 1st, when it was used by a lot of non-reqular users. Do you think having an official release candidate for one or two weeks before the final release would help with this? Or will this only be tested by the people who run daily builds anyway? Or is it smarter to have an official release with all the publicity, and make a bugfixed release a few weeks later like this time?
There was a bit of confusion with slightly different revision numbers for the various binaries. Would it make sense to have a branch for every release where bugfixes go if necessary so that it is a clear for providers of binaries and packagers what to build? Or a tag?
Should we try to actively make publicity for a release? We could make a list of news sites/blogs/... that we can tell about it to create a bit of a buzz? I guess a good place to start such a list would be the "FreeCAD on the web" thread.