It’s a little bit late, but it’s time to set the schedule for the next release cycle of Autoware.
The last release cycle went better than the 1.11 cycle, but there were still problems with massive PRs that were hard to review and PRs being submitted late in the process. The maintainer team has talked about this a bit and decided to revise the process slightly. We are still focusing on having a long period for testing before the release.
Here are the dates that the maintainer team is proposing:
- Merge request submission freeze: Tuesday, October 1, 2019 12:00 PM
- Merge request acceptance freeze: Friday, November 1, 2019 12:00 PM
- Release Tuesday, December 3, 2019 12:00 PM
This time we are not going to try a feature list freeze early in the process. Instead, we will say that if you get your MR in by the submission deadline, we will consider it for the release.
However, in the 1.12 release cycle we had a lot of pull requests submitted right before the code freeze deadline. This meant that in effect we were changing the code after the freeze because it took several weeks to get them all reviewed, corrected and merged. So this time we are setting a deadline for merge requests to be merged after the submission deadline. Anything that can’t be merged in that time will be bumped to the next release. To avoid your MR potentially being bumped, I encourage you to submit it well before the submission freeze. I also highly recommend doing any feature as several small, independently-usable MRs rather than as one big chunk. This will speed up the reviewing and merging process.
The dates include a full month for testing after MRs are due to be merged. This will give us plenty of time to find and fix bugs without new features appearing.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please reply to this topic and we will take them on board. If not, then happy coding!