[ECOS] eCos 3.0 planning

[John Dallaway]

eCos community

The assignment of copyright in the eCos public sources to the FSF is now 
complete and it is time to push forward with our plans for a new release 
of eCos. A new release at this time is important for a number of reasons:

a) It allows us to draw a line which marks eCos under FSF copyright 
ownership. For this reason alone, we will be bumping the major version 
number and make this an "eCos 3.0" release.

b) Although most members of the eCos community work from our CVS 
repository, a new release will generate publicity for the project and 
send a clear message to technology decision makers.

c) A new release will provide a better experience for users downloading 
and installing eCos for the first time.

We plan to incorporate the following new features into the eCos 3.0 release:

* Support for more recent GNU toolchain components
* Flash v2 infrastructure and example drivers (supporting multiple flash
   parts on a single hardware platform)
* Support for Microsoft Vista within the eCos host tools

Of course, the new release will also incorporate the numerous 
enhancements, bug fixes and platform support packages that have been 
contributed since the last release.

As with previous releases, we will aim for verification of eCos 
architectural support by testing on a representative set of hardware 
platforms to which the maintainers have access. Offers of assistance in 
testing on some of the less common architectures would be gratefully 
received. Please contact the eCos maintainers at:

   ecos-maintainers@ecos.sourceware.org

We will be aiming to release eCos 3.0 towards the end of September 2008 
and will therefore branching in August. If you have any local patches 
that you would like to see incorporated into the new release, please 
submit them for review as soon as possible, allowing time for the 
copyright assignment process.

John Dallaway
eCos 3.0 release manager

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