Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2015 10:50:59 +0200
From: "Wladimir J. van der Laan" <laanwj@gmail.com>
To: Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org>
Message-ID: <20151001085058.GA10010@amethyst.visucore.com>
References: <20150924112555.GA21355@amethyst.visucore.com>
	<201509301757.44035.luke@dashjr.org>
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In-Reply-To: <201509301757.44035.luke@dashjr.org>
Cc: Bitcoin development mailing list <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Bitcoin Core 0.12.0 release schedule
Precedence: list

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 05:57:42PM +0000, Luke Dashjr wrote:
> On Thursday, September 24, 2015 11:25:56 AM Wladimir J. van der Laan via 
> bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > 2015-12-01
> > -----------
> > - Feature freeze
> 
> Where is "Consensus freeze"? Shouldn't this be put off until after the HK 
> workshop in case a hardfork is decided on? Or have we de-coupled it from the 
> release process entirely anyway (since old versions need an update for it 
> too)?

In principle, "feature freeze" means that any large code changes will no longer go into 0.12, unless fixing critical bugs. 

I'm not keen on postponing 0.12 for such reasons - after the HK workshop I'm sure that it will take some development/testing/review before code makes it into anything. Apart from that there's a good point to decouple consensus changes from Bitcoin Core major releases.

We've seen lot of release date drift due to "this and this change needs to make it in" in the past, that was a major reason to switch to a time-based instead of feature-based release schedule.

We can always do a 0.12.1.

Wladimir