Re: [Xen-devel] RFC: change to 6 months release cycle

[Juergen Gross <jgross@xxxxxxxx>]

On 10/05/2015 02:55 PM, Wei Liu wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 05, 2015 at 12:55:00PM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 13:51 +0200, Juergen Gross wrote:
> > > On 10/05/2015 01:44 PM, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 12:23 +0100, Wei Liu wrote:
> > > > > we can pick a stable tree every X releases etc etc.
> > > > I think switching to an LTS style model, i.e. only supporting 1/N for
> > > > longer than it takes to release the next major version might be
> > > > interesting
> > > > to consider. I'm thinking e.g. of N=4 with a 6 month cycle.
> > > >
> > > > I think some of our downstreams (i.e. distros) would like this, since
> > > > it
> > > > gives them releases which are supported for a length of time more like
> > > > their own release cycles.
> > > And again there will be a rush to get a feature in at the end of each
> > > Nth cycle, as it will end up in the long-term stable version...
> > I actually think there is plenty of stuff which people just want in _some_
> > release.
> I concur. Having a feature in some release, albeit not the stable one,
> helps. For example, downstream developer will have a strong
> justification for backporting stuff.
How often did we have real feature backports in the past?

Won't the increasing number of feature backport requests nullify the
purpose of the short-time support of some releases: decrease the load
of the stable maintainers?

> As for "rush to get a feature at the end of each Nth cycle", it wouldn't
> put us in a worse situation than we already have because N==1 nowadays.
Sure. But reasoning "6 month release cycle is better because no feature
needs to rush in" and "doing a stable release every 2 years with a
possible rush at the end won't make it worse than today" seems to be a
little bit strange to me.

I don't fight against the 6 months release cycle. I just wanted to point
out some IMO wrong justification for it.


Juergen

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