[Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Stable trees and release time

[Guenter Roeck]

On 09/04/2018 01:58 PM, Laura Abbott wrote:
> I'd like to start a discussion about the stable release cycle.
> 
> Fedora is a heavy user of the most recent stable trees and we
> generally do a pretty good job of keeping up to date. As we
> try and increase testing though, the stable release process
> gets to be a bit difficult. We often run into the problem where
> release .Z is officially released and then .Z+1 comes
> out as an -rc immediately after. Given Fedora release processes,
> we haven't always finished testing .Z by the time .Z+1 comes
> out. What to do in this situation really depends on what's in
> .Z and .Z+1 and how stable we think things are. This usually
> works out fine but a) sometimes we guess wrong and should have
> tested .Z more b) we're only looking to increase testing.
> 
> What I'd like to see is stable updates that come on a regular
> schedule with a longer -rc interval, say Sunday with
> a one week -rc period. I understand that much of the current
> stable schedule is based on Greg's schedule. As a distro
> maintainer though, a regular release schedule with a longer
> testing window makes it much easier to plan and deliver something
> useful to our users. It's also a much easier sell for encouraging
> everyone to pick up every stable update if there's a known
> schedule. I also realize Greg is probably reading this with a very
> skeptical look on his face so I'd be interested to hear from
> other distro maintainers as well.
> 

For my part, a longer -rc interval would not help or improve the
situation. Given the large number of security fixes, it would
actually make the situation worse: In many cases I could no longer
wait for a fix to be available in a release. Instead, I would have
to pick and pre-apply individual patches from a pending release.

I like the idea of having (no more than) one release per week with
the exception of security fixes, but longer -rc intervals would be
problematic.

Guenter