[Development] Feature freeze and CI load

[Lars Knoll]

Hi all,

This is a short reminder that feature freeze for 6.2 is coming up tomorrow evening. There is still time over the weekend to merge pending changes that didn’t make it until Friday evening, but those days should only be used to merge changes that are already approved but still pending on gerrit.

We do have a few exceptions to the feature freeze though:
* Qt WebEngine still has some work that needs to be finished to get especially cross-compilation working with cmake. That work can continue past the feature freeze.
* Qt Multimedia has missing features for the Android and Windows backends and needs some more API changes that will happen after the feature freeze
* The QML cmake API changes that are pending on gerrit can proceed to get in (see https://codereview.qt-project.org/q/topic:%22qml-cmake-api%22+(status:open%20OR%20status:merged) ). But let’s try to get those done as quickly as possible, ideally until Monday, so that those changes don’t delay the branching

To help with that, I’d like to ask everybody to help reduce load on CI for things that are unrelated to the feature freeze. Especially, please think twice or three times before pressing the ‘precheck’ button in gerrit. Every such run adds quite some load to CI and we’ve been having a huge amount of those lately. If the run is not critical for the feature freeze consider waiting until the branching of 6.2 has happened. For those working inside the Qt Company, please also consider using the internal coin status check page and limit the precheck to one or two platforms. 

Thanks,
Lars