[Gluster-Maintainers] 3.8 Plan changes - proposal

[Vijay Bellur]

On 01/07/2016 04:11 PM, Kaleb KEITHLEY wrote:
> On 01/06/2016 09:44 PM, Vijay Bellur wrote:

>
>> 2. Ensure that most of our components have tests in distaf by 3.8. I
>> would like us to have more deterministic pre-release testing for 3.8 and
>> having tests in distaf should help us in accomplishing that goal.
>
> distaf testing is good, but will we ever get any unit tests?
>

One step at a time :). distaf will provide us the much needed multi-node 
tests that we cannot do with our existing framework.

>> 5. Move out 3.8 by 2-3 months (end of May or early June 2016) to
>> accomplish these changes.
>
> Hmmm. I thought our releases were driven by the calendar, not features?
> Or am I confusing 3.X releases with 3.X.Y releases?
>
> Just to play the devil's advocate , what if we released 3.8 by the
> original schedule with whatever is ready, and then did a 3.9 in May/June
> with the new features in tech preview?
>

Yes, we have been calendar driven so far with .X releases. However, if 
we indeed were adhering to the dates we should have released 3.8 in 
November. Given that there has been no intense clamor for 3.8 in the 
community, I think we can attempt this change that can provide better 
results to all our stakeholders:

- Users get more features to test and have better polished core features 
in a .0 release.

- Developers get more feedback about features early on.

In any case, we will learn more about how the community perceives this 
change when we broaden the discussion.

most of our community users do not upgrade as quickly as we would like 
them to since they deploy gluster in production. Having more frequent 
minor releases would cause their deployments to be unsupported and also 
increase our maintenance burden. So striking an appropriate balance in 
terms of our release schedule seems key to me.

-Vijay