[Gluster-Maintainers] RFC for change in release model

[Pranith Kumar Karampuri]

hi,
         Yesterday Vijay, Niels and I discussed(#gluster-dev) that there 
has been a tension/conflict between keeping a release stable vs maturing 
new features where users have been giving feedback.
At the moment if the feature misses a release, for us to get feedback 
from users it generally takes 7-8 months because it needs to get into 
next release. So we want to shorten it by following shorter minor 
release cycles (3months) with some releases termed as long term 
support(LTS) like we have in Ubuntu world(At least that is where I first 
heard it). So the proposal is to have 3.8 as long-term support release, 
3.9 to be released in September which is not a long-term support 
release. As soon as 4.0 gets released 3.9 based releases will stop as 
all those features will move to 4.0. branch. This will make sure that 
small features won't be backported to already released branches. Also we 
can point enthusiastic users to try the new features out in the next 
release, which is not too far off.

        From a user's perspective people who are not looking for any new 
features should stay on long-term-support branch based releases. Where 
as people who are interested in a new feature can start their testing 
with release where the feature is available whether it is going to be 
long-term-support or not and give us feedback, if they like the 
stability they can even put that in production. Once the feature is in a 
LTS branch they should stick to LTS branches from then on.

         Please feel free to let us know what you guys think about this. 
Main problem we need to solve is to prevent new features to land in the 
middle of stable release cycles. At the same time not have longer wait 
times for users to give us feedback.

Pranith