[tor-dev] New conventions for Tor ticket milestones

[Nick Mathewson]

(This is going to be interesting for people who use trac to look at
tickets for the component "Tor" -- that is, the core Tor network
daemon -- and basically nobody else.)

Hi, all!

0.2.5 is getting close to feature-freeze time: by default, any feature
for which the code is not already implemented is now targeted for
0.2.6 or later.  We can make smart exceptions, but we need to be
careful.

Yes, I'm trying to get major releases out more frequently.  My target
is still 2-3 per year.

But this isn't a freeze announcement: it's a trac milestone
announcment. You see, around when we do a freeze for Tor 0.2.N, we
usually take one or two passes through the tickets labelled "Tor:
0.2.N-final" and move most of them --the ones that we can defer-- into
"Tor: 0.2.(N+1)-final".

That's a silly way to handle milestones, and it's only going to get
sillier as we do more frequent releases.  It means that 0.2.5-final,
for instance, contains "everything we want to do in 0.2.5.x-final"
plus "everything we *would like to do* in 0.2.5.x-final, given
infinite resources"

So, as discussed at the dev meeting, now that I'm doing the first pass
of ticket triage for 0.2.5.x-final, I'm splitting tickets into three
places, not 1:

   * Tickets that we should really take another look at and try to
resolve before 0.2.5.x is stable remain in "Tor: 0.2.5.x-final".
   * Tickets that I really believe we should do in the 0.2.6 go into
"Tor: 0.2.6.x-final".  As usual, no guarantees.
   * Tickets which I want to do "real soon now", maybe in the next
release, but where they aren't blocking any particular release go into
"Tor: 0.2.???". This is the new "We would like to do this any day now"
milestone.

Also, as before:
   * Tickets where I'm clueless go into "Tor: unspecified"

I'm trying to mark tickets where we should consider a backport with
the appropriate keywords.  "025-backport" means "A fix for this is
backportable into 0.2.5 if we solve it soon enough and the fix is
clean enough", and so forth.

These are, necessarily, fuzzy categories.  I'm also going to make some
triage mistakes over the next few days.  If there's anything that I'm
putting in the wrong milestone IYO, let's talk.

best wishes,
-- 
Nick Mathewson