Recently I posted a blog post (http://blog.qgis.org/2016/01/17/help-us-to-plan-for-qgis-3-0/) summarising the considerations on how we should go about the process of putting out a QGIS 3.0 release. At the bottom of that posting is a proposal outlined by Matthias Kuhn. I created this thread so that we can agree or reject Matthias' proposal. In the situation where it is rejected, a viable alternative should be offered. Once we have an agreed upon roadmap, we should communicate this clearly to the greater QGIS user community.

For easy reference, here is Matthias' proposal:

QGIS 2.16 Release as usual in 4 months

-> PyQt5 Support
-> Python 3 Support
-> Wrapper library for PyQt4/PyQt5
-> Maybe a helper transition script that does 80% of the rewrite
-> All old plugins still work
-> Some python code is updated (console, plugin manager, processing) to
have some guidelines and experience how to update python code
-> For future debian, mac osx… versions there’s a qt5 version around
(with almost no plugins working)

During the same time: make some noise that QGIS 3 is coming and we need
everybody to put some money and dev time aside for it and that it’s
going to be amazing.

After that: 8 months break for 3.0 (maybe some betas after 4 months and
every month after)