Releases from KDE SC 4.12 and beyond

Motivation

The main motivation for this change is to reduce the amount of time between releases, making us able to deliver new features faster to our users while keeping if not improving the current quality.

Proposed changes

The time elapsed between big releases (4.12, 4.13, 4.14...) will be of 3 months (instead of 6) having the following structure:

Two month for merging features
One month to prepare the release

Things to take into account as a Maintainer

Since we will be decreasing the amount of time for testing, it is specially important that only features that are reviewed and stable are merged into master. Saying it in another way master should be always in a state where we can make a release from it.

Tentative schedule for 4.12

Start of development: July 10, 2013 (Potential moment of 4.11 branching)
- During this time merging of STABLE features is allowed
Branching of 4.12: October 14, 2013 (Two month after 4.11 release)
- Beta 1 is created ASAP
- Strings are frozen
- Dependencies are frozen
- Artwork/Bindings frozen
- API frozens
Release candidate: October 30, 2013 (2 weeks after Beta 1)
Release 4.12 final: November 14, 2013 (One month after 4.12 branching)
Release 4.12.1: December 14, 2013
Release 4.12.2: January 14, 2014
Release 4.12.3: February 14, 2014

Tentative schedule for 4.13

Start of development: October 14, 2013 (Branching of 4.12)
Branching of 4.13: January 14, 2014 (Two month after 4.13 release)
- Release of 4.13 Beta
Release candidate: January 30, 2013
Release 4.13 final: February 14, 2013 (Three months after 4.12)
Release 4.13.1: March 14, 2014
Release 4.13.2: June 14, 2014
Release 4.13.3: July 14, 2014