our releases break too many user sites

[drammock]

Every time we push out a release, a flood of new issues comes in. As a maintainer I feel responsible to fix them, but as a maintainer with other, higher-priority responsibilities I don't really have time to drop everything and make hotfixes.

For our most recent release I suggested we do an RC, which happened, but then a full release was done almost immediately (AFAICT after only one user site had tested it). In my mind that defeats the purpose of an RC, which is to give several test users time to try it and find bugs, so that we have time to fix those bugs at our own pace before those bugs break all user's sites.

I'd like to propose a change to our release process, which is to always require and RC and to set a mandatory minimum delay between the RC and the full release.