Creation of gem5 v23.1.0.0 staging branch scheduled for December 1st

[BobbyRBruce]

As discussed and agreed upon during our November Developer meeting (https://github.com/orgs/gem5/discussions/482), we have scheduled the creation of our staging branch from develop for December 1st. This means gem5 developers have until December 1st to have their contributions merged into develop for inclusion in version v23.1. Contributions made after this deadline will have to wait for the v24.0 release.

Once created the staging branch will be tested rigorously and our release procedures followed. The branch shall exist for at least 2 weeks in order to run tests and give the community time to inspect the branch. Once the staging branch is found to be ready for release it shall be merged into the stable branch thus officially releasing gem5 v23.1. Assuming a typical 2-week staging branch period this release to occur on December 15th.

Contributions to the staging branch via pull request are permitted but, in the interests of ensuring new bugs are not introduced, good justification should be given as to why the change cannot wait for the following release (v24.0). Usually contributions to the staging branch are bug fixes or contributions that have no chance of changing software functionality (e.g. documentation updates, format fixes, etc.). New features or significant enhancements to gem5 should continue to be made to the develop branch during this time. The staging branch will be periodically merged into the develop branch to ensure contributions made to the staging branch are reflecting in the develop branch,

Issue #558 will be used to keep track of changes which must be included in v23.1 and therefore should be merged into develop prior to the staging branch creation.

[BobbyRBruce]

Staging branch created here: https://github.com/gem5/gem5/tree/release-staging-v23-1.