Release plans: Version 4.4.4 and beyond

[sfeam (E. Merritt) <eam...@gm...>]

Version 4.4.4
=============

My plan is to release version 4.4.4 some time in the next month,
consistent with the ~6 month release cycle that has held throughout
the 4.2 and 4.4 release series.  NEWS entries for 4.4.4 include

* NEW boxxyerrors plot style now allows variable color
* NEW splot with pm3d now allows variable rgb color
* NEW "nonuniform matrix" indicates ascii data with explicit x, y
* CHANGE columnhead(N) is a string-valued function, not a keyword
* CHANGE Demarcate plots in svg output using <g id="Plot_#"><title>...
* CHANGE xticlabels() works for binary data files as well as ascii
* CHANGE "set key maxrows" now applies to 3D plots as well as 2D
* CHANGE rewrite installation path rules for TeX files
* FIX wxt terminal should now work on at least some flavors of OSX
* FIX incorrect space allowed for outside left key box
* FIX buffer overflow from enhanced text timefmt tic labels
* FIX correction for offset in epochs when reading in time format "%s"
* FIX discontinuity in defined palette limited by maxcolors
* FIX initialization of svg pattern-fill definitions
* FIX positioning of histogram bars when some data entries are missing
* FIX emf terminal can handle UTF-8 encoding

My thought is that 4.4.4 will probably be the last release in the
4.4 series.  Of course we can re-think that if significant issues
arise in the next 6 months.

Beyond
======

After releasing 4.4.4, I am thinking that we should re-tag the CVS
tree as the development branch for gnuplot version 5 and plan to
put out a version 5.0 release candidate sometime after the New Year,
aiming for a full release in the Spring.

The chief arguments I see for bumping the version to 5 
(rather than 4.6):

1) The code in the development branch has diverged enough from the 
code in the version 4 branch that most new patches cannot be easily
back-ported.

2) There are significant syntax and UI changes already in or queued for
the development branch, notably
- block-structured if/else/do/for/while statements
- nested iteration 
- local customization of linetypes using "set linetype"
- tab completion and UTF-8 support in the builtin readline
- reworked Windows driver
- "stats" subsystem (Patchset #2894333)

and probably more I'm not thinking of at the moment.

What do you think?