Any objections or other comments?
Not from me, I find that's a really good process.
I feel that frequent building of pdfTeX and XeTeX could help find the problems in building much faster than during the lenghty TL production, but if developers are not too responsive, that hardly helps.
I think you've outlined both the problem and its solution in this sentence: it would help to build all the binaries frequently, *but* it's hard to get quick responses from all the binary builders, *hence* it's more efficient to work at a slower pace, i.e. by releasing about once in a year. Plus, it gets work off your hand and shifts the burden to Karl and Peter :-)
When we started the minimals, all kinds of new functionality has been added to XeTeX that was crucial for proper functionality of ConTeXt in XeTeX, but I don't know of any other recent addition with that kind of influence.
Right. There's a kind of balance to it, I think: XeTeX development was most active in 2004--2006, then LuaTeX took over and the focus shifted, etc. It's unlikely that two different extensions of the TeX engine would be actively developed at the same time over a long period. Arthur