Release process for 2.18 cancelled

[David Kastrup]

In the last week it has become abundantly clear that the last-minute
attempt for reaching the conditions suitable for making a stable release
occured too late to arrive at a releasable state.

The work I scheduled for myself for arriving at such a state consisted
in dealing with several regressions and documentation inconsistencies
due to changes from myself in the 2.17 release cycle.  This would have
been somewhat realistic as a side load to manage in my upcoming
vacation.

It turns out that the pent-up pressure to get forward-looking changes
into the master branch that have transitory user interfaces or extensive
changes of internals not exposed to sufficient testing is already too
high to permit a prerelease phase focused on arriving at stable release
quality.

Forcing development into prerelease mode nevertheless would require an
amount of involvement that would be incompatible with the amount of time
I can invest during my vacation, and it would interfere with the
vacation (four work days per year are not really much in the first
place) both in terms of getting some sort of relaxation as well as in
being able to be focused enough on climbing not to endanger my climbing
partners' and my own health.

So a release process of 2.18 managed by me is off.  In the current
situation, I don't consider it realistic that we will be able to make a
stable release with sufficient reliability in the next four months at
least, likely longer.

-- 
David Kastrup