[dpdk-dev] Proposed dates for 19.02 release

["Mcnamara, John" <john.mcnamara@intel.com>]

Hi,

There are two constraints within the 19.02 release timeframe this year:

* Christmas/New Year's holidays
* Chinese Spring Festival Holiday 4th-10th February (with some people out
  the week before as well). Note this is much earlier than in previous years.

Since the majority of the testing is done by the Intel team in China we
would need to complete all testing before the end of January. Working back
from this and avoiding having people work over Christmas week we would have
the following dates:

* Proposal deadline Friday 23 November 2018
* Merge deadline    Friday 14 December 2018
* RC1 release       Friday 21 December 2018
* RCx + Testing     Friday 25 January  2019
* Release           Friday  1 February 2019

In order to meet these deadlines we would have to reduce the size/scope
of the release.

So the proposal would be that 19.02 is a smaller release and that we would
prioritize 19.05 as a larger release.

Note, this also means that the Proposal deadline in only about 1 month away
and that it may occur before the 18.11 is released.

If there are major objections or people have better ideas on how to schedule
the release then let us know.

John