I wanted to kick off a vote related to the
          following threads
        
        
        
        
        Although there was no consensus in the general
          case to say we should always branch at RC-x at any given
          release, there seems to be enough consensus for branching
          earlier, given a number of conditions are met:
        
        
        In particular:
        1: We should not re-open staging too early (aka we
          would need to get a sense how much churn to expect)
        2: Maybe we should not accept major re-factoring
          and leave it up to the discretion of thy maintainers to do so
          - aka Ian Jackson's option B. But there seems to be some
          disagreement around it. 
        
        
        2.1: Some maintainers are concerned that they
          would have to deal with backporting, if we re-opened early.
        
        
        2.2: A sensible compromise seems to me for the
          maintainer to evaluate whether a patch is ready to go in after
          RC3: if there is an amount of back porting that the maintainer
          can't deal with, it is IMHO OK for the maintainer to let the
          contributor know and give him/her the option to provide a
          patch for two trees as it is customary in Linux OR to wait
          until the ongoing release is out. This is a slight variant of
          Ian Jackson's option B in 
http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2015-08/msg00883.html  
        
        
        Of course, 1 will minimise the amount of incidents
          for 2
        
        
        = VOTE =  
        With that in mind: please vote on
        A) Do we think 4.6 is in a good enough state to
          branch at the next RC (which would be RC3)
        
        
        B) Do we have enough consensus given that there is
          some disagreement on how to deal with back-porting. In other
          words, does the proposal 2.2 above look sensible.