GRUB release schedule?

[Peter Jones]

Hi everyone,
Is there a plan for when upcoming GNU GRUB releases will happen?

As far as I can tell, the last official release on
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grub/ was 2.00 on 28-Jun-2012, and the last beta
on http://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/grub/ for the next version was
2.02~beta2 on 24-Dec-2013 .  There are (give or take) 471 patches
committed since that beta 18 months ago.

In the mean time, nearly every Linux distro is shipping a package
derived from the 2.02~beta2 release plus some number of patches,
some from the upstream repo and some not, and it's cumbersome to rectify
which ones aren't upstream vs which ones have been fixed upstream with
/nearly/ the same patch, etc., with all the noise of so many patches
since the release.

I suspect this would be better for a lot of GRUB users if releases
happened on a regular schedule, or if, relatively often (say once or
twice per year), a release schedule that spans several weeks and
organized some kind of alpha->beta->release progression were decided
upon and followed.

So, can we make a release process that happens according to some regular
cadence?  What needs to be done to make regular releases happen?  Going
for years with the patch volume GRUB sees without doing a release is
really not good for anybody.

-- 
        Peter