[RFC] QA & Branching

[Christophe Massiot]

Dear friends,

Releasing a new version of VLC is now a mess ; it imposes several 
weeks of bug hunting during which implementing new features is 
dangerous. 0.2.91 has shown that despite all the time we invested to 
release it, we didn't have the right methods. 0.2.91 suffers major 
stability problems.

Besides, sam will (hopefully) soon check in a new video output which 
might break a lot of things for several weeks.

For these reasons sam and I would like to suggest an enhanced 
development method (largerly inspired by those in use in the open 
source community). First, we shall immediately create a new stable 
0.2.92_BRANCH. This branch shall be intensively debugged, helped by a 
series of pre-releases (0.2.92-pre1, 0.2.92-pre2...). New features 
won't be added to this branch.

The main trunk remains the branch for experimental developments, and 
will, in time, become 0.3.0 and over. It will be branched every time 
a new stable release is planned (0.2.92, 0.2.93, etc.).

We think this scheme would simplify the development (no longer "stop 
adding new features, we're in release mode !") and make bug hunting 
more reliable (the stable branch won't change a lot).

Comments, etc.

[FYI this is inspired by what the PHP team has been forced to do in 
the 4.0.x releases]

-- 
Christophe Massiot.