[cross-project-issues-dev] What has the Planning Council done now?

["David M Williams" <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Not near as much as the title implies,
but thought that title would catch your attention. :) This is primarily
a "keeping everyone informed" note. 

We did, at our last meeting, officially
agree on the Milestone dates, RC dates, and release date for Neon. 

If you do not recall, all we had currently
agreed to only the first four milestones, for this calendar year. Once
we made some high-level decisions about the Neon (and remaining Mars) update
releases, it was clear the remaining milestone dates for Neon should have
a similar pattern as previous years.  That is what we have put in
our plan
[1]. 

For the table version, see the Neon
Plan schedule [2]. I will be updating
the calendar
[3] later this week. 

A bit off topic, but if anyone uses
RSS (XML feeds) for the Google Calendar, you have to change soon, by mid-November.
I received a notice of this since I own some calendars there. If you did
not get a notice, and if you would like to read about it and alternatives
to use instead, see their support
note [4] or, you could just google
for it. :) 

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In case you have not heard this before,
we are considering three Neon update releases, instead of two?

While we have not made a firm decision,
nor exact dates, we have tentatively planned for three update releases
for Neon, rather than the traditional two that we have done since forever.
They would be approximately equally spaced, one per quarter, at around
the same time as Neon-Plus-One milestones 2, 4, and 6, in other words,
around September, December, and March. We will have final decisions and
dates by mid-November.

I thought I'd give this "early
warning" in case this change concerns or effects anyone in ways we
do not know. If so, then you would still have time to talk to your Planning
Council representative before our next meeting, November 11. You could
ask them "why haven't you told us about this yet?" :)  More
seriously, please let them know your concerns, or what you want to get
out of it. We are making this change since there have been some general
requests to allow more frequent opportunities for people to provide new
features or bug fix releases to their users.  It does imply some amount
of extra work for each project on the release train, but, we think not
too much -- depending on what the project wants to release. 

To continue being serious, if you do
have any questions, concerns, or compliments, please discuss with your
PMC, Strategic member company, or directly to your Planning Council representative.
I am just giving notice here, not asking for a large group discussion.

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Perhaps not as interesting at the above,
we also decided to codify officially in our plan, the principle we followed
at the end of Mars.1: 

A rebuild during the quiet, final
week before a release implies an automatic slip of one week for the official,
simultaneous release date. 

I just wanted to point that out, so
everyone would know about that constraint in the future, no one would be
surprised, and we would all have the same expectations during that final
week. In other words, just keeping you informed. 

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Thanks for reading, 

[1] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Neon/Simultaneous_Release_Plan
[2] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Neon/Simultaneous_Release_Plan#Schedule
[3] https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src="">
[4] https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/6285065?p=xml_deprecation&rd=1