Anastasia Klimchuk aklm@chromium.org writes:
I haven’t done any releases before, so tell me if I am wrong. But what I am thinking when looking at the list of issues: maybe we can have some time for “just fixing issues on master” and after that do a release branch? Does it make sense? “Some time” won’t take forever (AU winter maybe?). I have issue #353 assigned to me, so now it has to happen :)
My $0.02 from dealing with various projects.
Flashrom is small and I think it's best to do the release off master, getting everything done that needs to get done, and then beginning the process with feature freeze, moving to regression and doc fixes only, maybe alpha, beta, rc and then release. Only when there is a release create a branch that would be used for micro updates to the release while master is back open for development.
In order to make a release it is necessary to say no to further changes. It is always possible to improve, but that leads to never releasing, and users are better served with a series of better releases, as long as each one does not have significant regressions. This is easy to say and hard to do!
Creating a release branch before release means changes happen in master disconnected from release and there's backporting effort and a lot more work. Not branching incentivizes everyone to get the release done and hold their feature branches.