[Gluster-Maintainers] RFC for change in release model

[Atin Mukherjee]

On 04/15/2016 03:16 PM, Pranith Kumar Karampuri wrote:
> 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.
How about the maintenance. Are we continue to have 3 LTS and
intermediate short term releases in between or as an overall 3 releases?
> 
>         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
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