Re: Git v3.0 timeline, was Re: What's cooking in git.git (Sep 2026, #08)

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

> Fair enough: I did ask you to confirm my summit summary. Let me separate
> that from what I need for planning: a proposal from you as release
> maintainer can be discussed on the list on its own merits, without waiting
> for publication of the meeting record or claiming summit consensus.

As I wrote, after the current cycle ends at the end of this month, a
10-12 week cycle including the end-of-year slowness would mean the
next cycle 2.98 will end at the end of this year.  Expolation from
there, 2.99 will be March 2027.

The consensus in the room was that we want to use 2.99 as a signal
that something big is coming, so between 2.99 and 3.0 needs to be
some lead time for "advertisement".  This lead time between 2.99 and
3.0 does not have to be the usual 8-to-12-weeks full release cycle.

I do not think there was a firm agreement on the date for 2.99.1 and
3.0.  Potential factors mentioned in the room included that we may
want to match the LTS release schedule of major distros.  My
preference would be to give a month after 2.99 to apply only
accumulated bugfixes and nothing else and tag it as 2.99.1, which
means 2.99.1 would be April 2027.

The contents of 3.0 should be identical to 2.99.1 except for the
breaking changes are enabled in 3.0 while they are disabled in
2.99.1.  Volunteers can run 2.99.X series indefinitely to help LTS
distributions.

At the release engineering level, I am very tempted to keep the
WITH_BREAKING_CHANGES Makefile knob in 3.0 release in order to keep
the differences between 2.99.1 and 3.0 to absolute minimum, and then
remove the "dead code" that is used when WITH_BREAKING_CHANGES is
not enabled from 3.X at our leasure.

So the above is what I have in mind, shaped mostly around the
concensus at Contributor's summit (or at least how I understand what
the concensus was), with my preference filling in what was not
firmly decided in the room.

Good enough?