[Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'd like to start preparing for the creation of the next release branch in advance of the next major release of Wireshark and the first major release of Stratoshark (1.0).

We were planning on increasing Wireshark's major.minor version number to 5.0, but after some discussion around Qt version support, the new plan is to increase it to 4.6 and retain support for Qt 5, and to require Qt 6 in a later 5.0 release.

I've come up with the following tentative schedule, which will give us a 4.6.0 release in early October:

Aug 27 : Release Wireshark 4.4.9 and 4.2.13
Aug 28 : Create the release-4.6 branch and switch the master branch version to 4.7
Aug 29 : Release Wireshark 4.6.0rc1 and Stratoshark 0.9.3
[...]  : Release Wireshark 4.6.0rc2, rc3, and rc4 as needed
[...]  : Release Stratoshark 0.9.4 and 0.9.5
Oct  8 : Release Wireshark 4.4.10, 4.2.14, and 4.6.0
Oct ?? : Release Stratoshark 1.0

If you need to delay any of the above, particularly the creation of the release-4.6 branch, please let me know.

The Wireshark 4.6 (formerly 5.0) milestone can be found at https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/milestones/4 and the Stratoshark 1.0 milestone can be found at https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/milestones/6. If any issues are missing from those milestones let me know.

In accordance with our support lifecycle policy 4.2.14 will be the last 4.2.x release.

Finally, 4.4.x was supposed to be the last release branch that used an odd minor version for development releases and an even minor version for stable releases:

https://lists.wireshark.org/archives/wireshark-dev/202407/msg00010.html

It looks like that will have to wait for a future release.