New Newt & Process for B2

[Sterling Hughes <st...@apache.org>]

Howdy,

I'd like to talk about the process for releasing B2 here, in the context 
of a number of changes that have been made for newt.  I am sending a 
separate email to describe the changes in detail, but wanted to first 
begin to settle on process items.

Newt is our build and package management tool, and after a conversation 
last Friday, we decided to rewrite pretty large parts of it.  The new 
version is in develop now, and it matches up nicely with 
incubator-mynewt-core/develop and incubator-mynewt-blinky/develop.

We have a release coming up, and I think its important to get these 
changes out there, because:

- The longer we have the B1 code out there, the more we have to support 
it.  We're seeing many people are starting to adopt and play around with 
Mynewt, and don't want to have to break their way of working.

- B2 is really way better than B1.  Plus, I have confidence in our 
approach for build and package management for B2.  So while it may need 
to stabilize and improve, the B1 code is a dead-end.

So, in the context of getting B2 out the door, what I'd like to do:

- Agree that the process for release is going to be:

	- Merge origin/develop into origin/master and tag origin/master for 
release.
		- There will be a large number of changes to origin/master prior to 
release.  However, the changes to the os core are small, it's mainly the 
packaging system.

	- Vote on the tag of origin/master.

Typically, we would not make (any) changes to origin/master a week prior 
to release, or make a very small number.  However, because of the 
changes to Newt, I don't think this is the right call for this release.

NOTE: We have not made any major changes to the core C libraries that 
people would be building against, just the build & package tool.

Does this work for everyone?

If so, I propose that we get origin/develop ready for release today, and 
then merge to origin/master tomorrow evening (to give people a little 
time to respond to this mail.)   We then send out a mail Saturday 
morning with the release tag for VOTING on the incubator list, and push 
things through the larger incubator process.

I apologize for this process, we had, I think, all planned to have no 
major changes to the source code the week prior to release.  However, I 
really believe this the right decision because the new approach in newt 
is much better, and we don't want to have to change the way people build 
& manage products once we've started to get adoption.  The current B1 
release is therefore something we'd want to get people off of as quickly 
as possible.

Alright, description of newt is my next mail. :-)

Thanks,
Sterling