On 27/07/18 00:13, Stefano Stabellini wrote:On Wed, 25 Jul 2018, Juergen Gross wrote:
Its time to plan the Xen 4.12 release dates.
There have been concerns with the schedule of 6 months between releases,
as this scheme is leading to too many supported versions of Xen at a
time. The needed resources to backport bug fixes and security fixes as
well as doing the tests for all those releases are a limiting factor to
push out the current main release as well as point releases on time.
After some discussions at the Xen developer summit, on xen-devel and
between the committers a slightly longer release cycle of 8 or 9 months
was suggested.
With 18 months of full support and 36 months of security support the
number of concurrent supported releases will be the same with either 8
or 9 months release cycles, so I have chosen an 8 month cycle for now.
Having only 3 possible times in the year for a release will make it
easier to avoid major holiday seasons.
In case there is no objection I'm planning Xen 4.12 with:
* Last posting date: December 14th, 2018
* Hard code freeze: January 11th, 2019
* Release: March 7th, 2019
Release of Xen 4.13 would then be early November 2019, 4.14 at early
July 2020.
Given the holdidays season (it is not just Julien going on vacation but
pretty much everybody), wouldn't it be better to move the hard code
freeze by a couple of weeks? For instance Jan 25th? We can still keep
the release date as Mar 7th, there should be still enough time?
I don't think planning with a 6 week freeze period is a good idea. Thelast releases took longer than 2 months.We could slip the complete release by 2 weeks, of course. In this caseI'd move the last posting date to January. So something like:* Last posting date: January 11th, 2019* Hard code freeze: January 25th, 2019* Release: March 21st, 2019
Another alternative would be to move the dates backwards rather than forward. The 4.12 development window effectively opened 21-06-18, so a last posting data and hard code freeze before Xmas should be OK. Then assume that there won't be RC's for at last 2 (maybe 3) weeks during the winter holidays. But as long as someone is there to keep an eye on OSSTEST and to do a force push and build an RC1 before Xmas that may be OK: but it would probably still be OK if RC1 slipped until just after New Years Eve.
Risks for that schedule are:
- last posting date short after holiday season - is that really a
problem?
- Chinese new year rather soon after start of freeze period
- planned release date rather close to eastern
Opinions?
With this in mind. The only problem is that there will be Chinese New Year for some of the late to middle RCs ... Looking at possible RC dates RC1: wk Jan 1st RC2: wk Jan 8th RC3: wk Jan 15th RC4: wk Jan 22nd RC5: wk Jan 29th RC6: wk Feb 5th (Chinese New Year) RC7: wk Feb 12th |
