FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org>]

I want to solicit advice for how to release 0.61.  We've been saying it's
about time, and currently there's only one TODO:

Broken:
. tds_connect free tds structure on failure. This cause in some condition
  a pointer to garbage in some library

I don't know if this is correct, or whether we want to fix it before
releasing.  

But that's not the real question.  The real question is, what should be
the steps to prepare for a release.  Questions:

1.  How widely should .pre and .rc candidates be distributed?
2.  How widely should they be announced?
3.  How do we know when to call an rc 0.61?  
4.  How should the .pre/.rc status be reflected in AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE?
5.  How to deal with CVS?  Branch now, applying tags for each pre/rc?  Or
tag now, and branch only when we reach a pretty good rc, or something
else?  (Branch now seems simple, but might mean more pull ups?)

I'm prepared to copy almost any nightly snapshot and call it pre1. 

I'd also welcome other suggestion and such.  I'm not an experienced
release engineer.  Well, not *much* experienced, at any rate.  

--jkl