Subject: 3.11 builders are up / feature freeze

From: Natanael Copa <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2019 21:10:26 +0100

Hi!

As you may have noticed, the builders for v3.11 is up now.

This means that we need to focus on stabilizing what we have in the
tree and close open issues rather than work on adding new things or do
things that delays the release.

We have a freeze on toolchain and build tools. This means packages that
are used to build other packages (gcc, gnu make, cmake, ninja, flex,
bison, abuild etc). Everything that changes the way packages are built
in significant way.

What we want avoid is having the packages successfully built now, but
fails to build when we push security updates or bugfixes in future, due
to some change of the build tools.

We should also be careful with ABI breaking upgrades. I don't mind that
we push upgrades that break ABI as long as it does not creates much
work (and end up delay the release). So ABI breakages is ok if there
are around 5 packages that needs to be rebuilt. If there are many
packages that needs to be rebuilt then we should wait til after v3.11
release unless there are good reasons to include it in v3.11.

I do think that we should try get the 5.4 kernel in as it is an Long
Time Support release[1] and the kernel does not have any significance
on how the packages are built.

It would also be nice to have rpi4 support included. This should not
affect how the packages are built.

We do want the 5.4 (rc?) kernel and rpi4 support in before we do the
first 3.11 release candidate, so we can test it before release.

It would also be nice if we could try fix as many of the bugs/isses in
bug tracker as possible. 

Lets make this release the best release so far!

Thanks!

-nc

[1]: https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

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From: Kaspar Schleiser <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2019 21:55:14 +0100

Hi,

> Lets make this release the best release so far!

I wonder what the release manager at Microsoft used as closing words,
back in the days, for Windows 3.11. :)

Kaspar