[Bitcoin-development] Bitcoin Core 0.10 release schedule

[Wladimir <laanwj@gmail.com>]

Now that headers-first is merged it would be good to do a 0.10 release
soon. Not *too* soon as a major code change like that takes some time
to pan out, but I'd like to propose the following:

- November 18: split off 0.10 branch, translation message and feature freeze
- December 1: release 10.0rc1, start Release Candidate cycle

That leaves three weeks until the freeze. After the release and branch
split-off, the RC cycle will run until no critical problems are found.
For major releases this is usually more painful than for stable
releases, but if we can keep to these dates I'd expect the final
release no later than January 2015.

Let's aim to have any pending development for 0.10 merged before
November 18. Major work that I'm aware of is:

- BIP62 (#5134, #5065)
- Verification library (#5086, #5118, #5119)
- Gitian descriptors overhaul, so that Gitian depends = Travis depends (#4727)
- Autoprune (#4701)
- Add "warmup mode" for RPC server (#5007)
- Add unauthenticated HTTP REST interface (#2844)

Let me know if there is anything else you think is ready (and not too
risky) to be in 0.10. You can help along the development process by
participating in testing and reviewing of the mentioned pull requests,
or just by testing master and reporting bugs and regressions.

Note: I intended the 0.10 release to be much sooner. The reason that
this didn't pan out is that I insisted on including headers-first, and
this took longer than expected. There seems to be a preference to
switch to a fixed (instead of feature-based) 6-month major release
schedule, ie

- July 2015: 0.11.0 (or whatever N+1 release is called)
- January 2016: 0.12.0 (or whatever N+2 release is called)
- July 2016: 0.13.0 (or whatever N+3 release is called)

Wladimir