This is a refinement to the proposal: Avoid Cherry Picked Releases
Goal: Make releasing as easy as possible
Suggested Solution: Don't use RCs for Quarterly releases (by default)
- We can still soak for a longer period of time than normal for riskier changes and we can advertise our soak to beta testers if we wish.
- We sometimes already do this, for example with 23.7.0.
- We can still use a release branch if we feel the need, this proposal just suggests by default we try to use main.
- There is no need for this proposal to change the concept or versioning of quarterly releases and what they might signal (more significant changes).
What needs to change?
Some sort of notification about upcoming breaking changes, the obvious place being in the changelog/release notes ahead of the change landing.
Suggested Deprecation Policy
- Have an "Upcoming breaking changes" section in the changelog, which announces features that are upcoming, e.g. a warning about big changes in the next quarterly release.
- Time it needs to be in changelog before releasing is at maintainers' discretion.
- Feature/branch/PR management of upcoming feature is at maintainers' discretion.
- Optionally add target release/date.