The Mesa 3D Release Process Is Changing

Ian Romanick of Intel who generally has been serving as the release manager of new Mesa releases, has announced some planned changes for releasing Mesa 3D drivers.

Ian shared the planned changes on the Mesa developers' list. The key information for Phoronix readers include:

- Mesa 9.2 is anticipated for release by the end of August (ideally, 22 August) so the 9.2 branch will be branched around the middle of July.

- There was no information talked about with renaming Mesa 9.2 to Mesa 10.0 with regards to reaching OpenGL 3.2/3.3 compliance.

- New Mesa stable point releases might come every two weeks now rather than monthly.

- Major Mesa releases are now anticipated for every three months rather than every six months. With the great rate of performance/feature improvements and other changes often sitting long in Git master for a number of months, Ian wants to update Mesa 3D drivers on a quarterly basis to ship code faster. (Of course, it's still up to the distributions whether to pull in major new Mesa releases midstream in a release...)

- Assuming the three month release process is a go, Mesa 9.3 will be released in mid-November.