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* `Releasing Bazaar <releasing.html>`_ -- the process for actually making
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a release or release candidate.
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Bazaar makes a release every month, preceded by a one-week
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release-candidate test.
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In any release we may fix bugs, add formats, change the default format,
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improve performance, add new commands or change command line behaviour,
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change the network protocol, or deprecate APIs. We sometimes also
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introduce new bugs, regress existing behaviour or performance, remove
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existing features or formats, or break behaviour or APIs depended upon by
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plugins, external programs or users.
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Some users are happy upgrading every month and consider the overall
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positive balance of changes is worth some amount of churn. But there are
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some serious problems:
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* You cannot get bug fixes without also getting disruptive changes.
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* Bazaar is seen as unstable.
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* Many releases cause some plugin breakage.
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* One month is not a very long window for dependent programs or systems
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to catch up to changes in Bazaar before the release goes out of date.
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* There's no clear indication to distributions which version they should
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* If people (or their distributions) just pick an arbitrary version, they
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may all be on different arbitrary versions, therefore they will have
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different behaviour and different bugs, and sometimes interoperation
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* Any effort we, or distributors, wanted to put into backporting fixes
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would be dissipated across many possible backport target releases.
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* When in the past we've tried either stalling releases for particular
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features, or having trunk frozen for some weeks, it causes churn and
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waste. People rush features in, or already landed features wait a long
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time to be released, or branches go out of date because they cannot
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After doing this for the 2.0 cycle (September 2009 through to early
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2010), it seems to be going well.
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Reviewing for the Stable Branch
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*******************************
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These are guidelines and can be interpreted case-by-case.
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* All changes to the stable branch should fix a bug, even if you would not
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normally file a bug for the change. The bug description should if at
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all possible explain how to manually verify the bug in a way that will
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fail before and pass after the change. (These are requirements for the
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* The change should be reasonably small and conservative.
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* Remember that the patch will be read during the SRU
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process and so keeping the patch small is useful even beyond keeping the
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logical changes small. Avoid doing mechanical bulk changes on the
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* Use particular care for things that may behave differently across
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platforms, encodings or locales. It's harder to thoroughly test these
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things before a release.
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* Generally speaking, just cleaning things up is not a sufficient reason
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to make changes to the stable branch. It has to actually fix a bug.
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* Changes to the stable branch should include tests as usual.
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* Don't change or remove existing APIs that might be used by plugins, even
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if they are underscore-prefixed. Adding APIs that are also being added
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to the trunk branch may make sense.
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* Keeping consistency with trunk is useful, but less important than
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keeping the stable branch stable.
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* (more items welcome)
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#. List thread "`[rfc] six-month stable release cycles`__", July 2009.
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.. __: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2009q3/060882.html
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#. List thread "[rfc] six-month stable release cycles", July 2009.
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doc/developers/cycle.txt
