In some ancient plan for the project it was written that we should
release a major release once a year. In practice the time between
latest versions has been closer to five than one year.
I'd like to set a goal to get the following versions out two years
apart. Two years is the time between Ubuntu LTS releases and also the
time between latest Debian releases. If we had the same two years,
that would provide each new Ubuntu LTS and Debian release a new
freeciv version. I'd also like to point out that going to yearly
releases would cause compatibility issues for those Ubuntu and Debian
users, as then they would update over two freeciv versions at once,
and we guarantee e.g. savegame compatibility over only one version
(though for savegames we do much more in practice). Their OS update
could make it impossible for them to continue their current game, or
to do ruleup for their custom rulesets.
As the release of freeciv-3.0 is currently scheduled to March-22 (not
rushing .0 version to Ubuntu-22.04 LTS), that would make March-24 our
goal for freeciv-3.1 release. Is that realistic with our limited
manpower? I don't know.
Anyway, to reach the March-24 goal we would need to be in beta around
spring -23, and in d3f around spring -22.
I'd say that we will be busy to get every detail of data formats
finalized in half a year (from past experience: the two or three
issues that are left last because we've been unable to solve them
before are going to be hard, and not going away in nearly as fast pace
as the issues we resolve first) with time to test that there's no
critical omissions. We do this while we also have two or three (as
long as we have S2_6) other branches to keep going.
- ML
