Suggestion: Changes to release process, release from branch

[Andreas K. Huettel]

Hello everyone, 

even though the next release is now still quite far away, I would like to already
propose some (in my opinion) minor changes to the release process:

* No changes to the procedure during soft freeze and freeze, no changes to basic
  timetable

* With the hard freeze two weeks before nominal/last possible release date, 
  the release branch is made, and the master branch is re-opened for development.

* The release branch is treated as "machine testing, only important bugfixes, 
  minimal activity", basically as before master during that period.

* Once things are OK, the release is cut from the release branch.

This has several advantages. What comes to my mind:

* The master branch is open earlier for the backlog of accumulated patches again.

* There is less chance of stray commits being pushed at last minute.

* Distros can treat the branch point as a release candidate for testing purposes.
  We could even add a corresponding tag.

* Last but not least, this means we'd be handling releases similar to gcc and
  binutils.

What do you think?

Cheers, 
Andreas

-- 
PD Dr. Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer 
(council, comrel, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Dilfridge
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 870 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/attachments/20260726/7479f5ce/attachment.sig>