2.21.0 release plans and considerations

[David Kastrup]

Recently I asked the list to consider not putting any changes in master
right now where we'd like to be able to figure out whether they are
"introduced after 2.21.0" or not.  At least with regard to build system
changes but likely also some other ones, it's probably safe to say that
this ship has sailed.

In order to get out a timely 2.21.0 reference, however, the original
plan still is not to merge translations (in order to avoid another
unforeseeable holdup) and release basically immediately (which will
likely amount to a week) after 2.20.0.  The desire for 2.21.0 to serve
as a reference point is still there, so if people could hold up anything
that has the chance to render 2.21.0 into something that will not
compile or work for a significant number of use cases, that would
improve our chances to make it such a reference point.

It would be really unfortunate if we had to hold up on merging
translations and thus paving the ground for a large catchup of the
translators to the master branch for longer than it takes to get out
2.21.0 as a reference point for the start of the 2.21 series.

So please, for any commits to staging in the next week, consider that
they may be part of 2.21.0 without further correction.  2.21.0 is
certainly not as seminal a point as 2.20.0 and people using unstable
releases are strongly encouraged to frequently update.  But for the sake
of a nice start-off, I think it would be nice to consider it with
somewhat less levity than, say, 2.21.37 (assuming that we don't cut 2.22
before reaching there).

Thank you for your understanding!

-- 
David Kastrup