I'm confused.. How is it that people don't understand that as soon as a release it out the door.. It's then time to merge libraries from trunk to release until the "release branch is closed" announcement goes out. Why is it that people want to wait until right before the release is close to do the merges?
because people are * busy with other things like day jobs * bugs are reported/fixed at any time * people wait for the tests to cycle before they merge changes into trunk * merging with svn is a pain and people try to limit the number of times they have to mess with it (at least this is my reason) * there is only one `release' branch and not one branch for each release, so it is not very clear what state the branch is in (unless you follow this list every day) fwiw, i'm not a big fan of late merges, either ... in the contrast ... but for the last releases we always had a wonderful schedule which was known in advance. but if you go though the list archives, there were several questions, if there is a release schedule for 1.50. even a question: "Which is the last day to merge to release a big change?" ... maybe you should have written your above advice as answer to that mail? ;)
I'm about to post a separate message discussing the length of beta periods.
may I add boost.context to 1.50 too?
By the time we're talking about a beta, it's usually much too late for new libraries.
frankly, one thing is talking about a beta, the other thing is announcing the beta schedule with the words `release is now closed' ... this simply gives people no time to plan in advance in order to merge stuff *before* the beta process starts