Development Roadmap of Bitcoin Core 0.9.2

The Bitcoin Core developers have a desire to do a mostly bug-fix and translation update release in v0.9.2. A feature and string freeze will start about 3 weeks from now.

The purpose of this development roadmap is to communicate the project intent and to better organize volunteers. Hopefully doing so will make clear when particular types of contributions are most welcome and help to push the release process forward in a more timely manner while also improving the quality of the release.  Missing a target goal is OK. The developers may decide to delay particular goals if there are good reasons on a case-by-case basis. While schedules may slip, it is generally a good thing for a goal to have existed.

Schedule (subject to change)

13 May 2014: Feature freeze.  Source string freeze.  Release candidate.

20 May 2014: Testing of a release candidate is roughly a week. More time can be added at the discretion of the developers to allow for testing if further release candidates are deemed necessary due to subsequent changes.

Nightly Gitian Builds

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=571414.0

To make it easier for non-developers and translators to get involved in testing unofficial deterministic nightly builds are now available.

Translation of Bitcoin Core

https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/bitcoin/

Transifex allows open source projects a convenient way to coordinate the work of many translators.  Periodically English language source strings from Bitcoin Core are synchronized to the Transifex project.  Those strings are then translated in the convenient Transifex web interface where contributors are able to join by creating a free account.  Senior contributors can be promoted to a Reviewer or Maintainer role for each language.  Developers pull from Transifex to merge translated strings back into Bitcoin Core. As a matter of policy translations are NOT accepted via Github pull requests as those changes would be overwritten by the next Transifex pull and there is no clean way to keep them in sync when changes are made in both places.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/translation_process.md

The latest version of the Translation process can be found here.

Bitcoin-Translators Announce-only List

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bitcoin-translators
Bitcoin-Translators mailing list is an announce-only mailing list for developers to communicate to translators at particular times when new translations are needed.  Replies and discussion would go to the bitcoin dev list.  Subscriptions to this list would additionally be valuable to the project as it allows for a convenient way to ask for translations of other related projects like bitcoin.org that are hosted on theTransifex platform.  Whenever source strings of significance are changed or deadlines are announced, translators will learn of work to be done in Transifex quickly as they will all be subscribed to this announce list.  Discussion of translation issues should be on the Bitcoin-Development list.

Other Improvements to the Translation process

• Prior to an intended release a String Freeze is declared on a particular date.  The string freeze exists to ensure that translators have a reasonable amount of time to translate new or modified source strings so their work can be included in a release.

• A significant issue with our past translation process was the lack of branch support in Transifex.  This meant that since master and v0.8.2 diverged in May 2013, translation updates made in Transifex were not included in the v0.8.x stable releases until the release of v0.9.0 in early 2014.  v0.9.1 similarly was released from a branch outside from master.  v0.9.2 is planned to be released directly from the master branch so translations for this upcoming release can be developed directly.  laanwj came up with a great idea for dealing with future releases where we will be able to keep translations for both diverged stable and master branch simultaneously in Transifex, with scripts automating the process of merging strings and separating them back to the diverged branches.