== Time based releases ==

We want to do time-based rather than feature based releases.

See for example [http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/TimeBased GNOME's info on time-based releases]. They've done this very successfully. See also [http://www.cyrius.com/publications/michlmayr-phd.html Martin Michlmayr's PhD thesis] in
which he argues for time based releases. It is extremely relevant to us. He surveys many similar projects like GCC, GNOME, Debian and others.

See the current [ReleaseTimetable release timetable].

== Process for major releases ==

This is yet to be finalised. The following is a straw man proposal.

 * -4 months: New package proposals
 * -2 months: Package proposals finalised
 * -6 weeks:  Package API frozen, alpha testing release
 * -4 weeks:  beta testing release
 * -2 weeks:  Package versions frozen, release candidate
 *  0:        Major release

== Process for minor releases ==

 * -2 weeks: Package versions frozen
 *  0:       Minor release

== Detailed steps ==

 * Bump version number in .cabal following package versioning policy
 * Update core libraries to match [http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Libraries_released_with_GHC what GHC provides]
 * Collect list of version revisions for packagers
 * Update list of external packages to latest version mapping to PVP bump of the HP itself.