Arbor release cycle and developer meetings

For the past years Arbor has been released without a schedule, mostly as a fuzzy function of the merger of new features. As of today, we’ve decided to change to a 3 month release cycle, both to get new features in a new release faster and to create more clarity on what users can expect the next Arbor.

The next Arbor release is planned for 19 January 2022.

Part of this change is the introduction of the Arbor Developer Meeting. This meeting takes place 10 weeks before the release, and is open to everyone. In this meeting, a proposed list of features (see “Next Release” column) is proposed for delivery in the next release. This meeting is the right place to make your own priorities known, and any filed Issues can be added for inclusion in the next (or one after) release. Please do join if you have research that depends on the delivery of features in Arbor releases, or if you’re interested in Arbor development! If you’d like to bring anything to our attention in the meeting, make it’s filed as an issue.

Our Kanban board lets you follow all of this outside of the developer meetings. At a glance you can see what’s cooking in Arbor. We plan to use Github’s Milestone feature to plan Issues for specific releases, so with time, the Milestone overview shall also give you some insight in what’s planned for and what’s already merged in Arbor.

The next developer meeting is planned for 24 November 2021, from 10:00-13:00 CEST. The meeting will be held here; downloadable as ICS file. Any changes to the scheduling of this meeting will be advertised here and through our Gitter.

Hope to see you there!

Update: the first Arbor Developer meeting was a great success! Please find the minutes here.