Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Stable BranchFriday April 2nd, 2004 By Asa DotzlerIt's been just about a year since we cut the 1.4 branch. In addition to the normal Mozilla application suite milestone release, Firefox and Thunderbird will be doing releases off of this branch — including Firefox 1.0 (!) and there are also major vendors planning releases to coincide with with Mozilla 1.7. All of this lines up well for making 1.7 our next long-lived branch. To make these releases successful, we need to focus on stability and data integrity bugs. To give ourselves the time to make further improvements to our stability, drivers are making some changes to the milestone plan. Rough Schedule:We're going to delay branching 1 week (to April 9). We'll be scheduling three release candidates from the 1.7 branch, each 2 weeks apart, with room for more if needed (first on or around April 14, second on April 28th, and final on April 12th). This means moving the 1.7 final release date out 1 month from mid-April to mid-May. Details:Delaying the branching for 1.7 by about a week will give us some more time to gather and respond to TalkBack data <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=238446>, helping to identify and fix crash bugs on the trunk where we have most of our QA and testing resources. The QA community has been working to get the crash buglist cleaned up as much as possible. To make 1.7 the most stable release ever, we'll be looking for engineering help to knock off as many of the reproducible, high-profile crashers as QA and TalkBack resources can identify. Shortly after branching (days) we will do the first of a series of 1.7 pre-releases to validate the much of stability work that's been underway since 1.7 beta (we've already knocked off a significant number of the 1.7 beta topcrashers). Because we tend to have somewhat fewer QA and testing resources on branches, we'll be doing these release candidates to keep the download, bug reporting, and Talkback volume high. Previous long-lived branches have had three of these release candidates and that seems like a reasonable approach for this branch. Got a response? TalkBack! | include("../shtml/sub_nav.html"); ?> |