One of the issues raised at the last summit was that our customers could use more time to prepare for schema change releases, since they require engineering effort on their part. In an effort to meet our customer’s needs we’re going to a set schedule for schema change releases. Going forward we’re going to have two schema change releases per year: On or about 15 May and on or about 15 October.
We’ve picked these two dates as dates that have the least amount of impact from holidays and people taking holidays. Most companies have normal working schedules around these dates, which should allow companies to dedicate the required resources to handle our schema changes.
However, we have one significant change that we need to push out on a more timely basis than May of next year. For that reason we’re going to plan a one-time exception to our new schedule for 12 January 2012. You can see the tickets we’ve scheduled for release in January in this schema change milestone.
We’ve already created release versions in Jira for all of the schema change releases in 2012. As we go through the year we’re going to add tickets to that milestone. Of course, we’re going to make lots of noise as these schema change release dates approach. We’re going to post a list of tickets that will be included no later than a month before the release.
Any questions? Ask them in the comments!
MetaBrainz Blog 
Hmm, the fixed schema change dates are a good idea, not only for companies, but also for normal users.
About the schema change at 12 January 2012: Of the 5 tickets mentioned, at least MBS-3646 and MBS-842 seem to be right in the middle of a discussion, with no clear solution posted (also MBS-3644 is a little vague). I think it would be great if the plan how the schema will change would be posted in the tickets at least a month before they get implemented, so that the solution can be commented on.