[Gluster-Maintainers] Release scheduling and lifecycle of versions
Pranith Kumar Karampuri
pkarampu at redhat.com
Wed Jun 15 00:38:19 UTC 2016
hi,
Some of our managers were cautioning us to use the term LTS with
care as it means something else in ubuntu world where LTS is how they make
money by providing support. I see that quite a few open source projects
have similar release cadence but they don't call them LTS. They call them
stable branches. May be it makes sense to call them stable branches and
feature branches rather than LTS/non-LTS? Suggestions for other names is
welcome. At least we need to clear any confusion that we are not looking to
make money out of the LTS branches :-D. Different name for the branches is
preferable.
On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 1:06 AM, Amye Scavarda <amye at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 11, 2016 at 10:55 AM, Atin Mukherjee <amukherj at redhat.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 06/10/2016 07:51 AM, Niels de Vos wrote:
>> > After several weeks of discussions on this list, in the weekly meeting
>> > and ad-hoc IRC chats, I have come to the following understanding of the
>> > release schedule, lifecyle and minor updates.
>> >
>> > ## What we want to address
>> >
>> > 1. regular releases, predictable cycle for users and other projects
>> > 2. faster "go to market" with new features, receive feedback from users
>> > 3. stable version(s) for 'happily running, no risk' deployments
>> > 4. active releases can do monthly bugfix updates (see backport criteria)
>> >
>> >
>> > ## Results of several rounds of discussion
>> >
>> > It seems that a 3 month release cycle is the most attractive. Each
>> > alternating major release would be a Long-Term-Support (LTS) one, the
>> > others are short living versions for users that are eager to test out a
>> > new feature.
>> >
>> >
>> > ## Three stable/LTS versions, 1.5 years of bugfixes
>> >
>> > In dates and versions, this results in something like:
>> >
>> > 3.5: EOL when 3.8 goes GA (2016-06)
>> > 3.6: EOL when 3.9 goes GA (2016-09)
>> > 3.7: EOL when 3.10 goes GA (2016-12)
>> > 3.8 [LTS]: EOL when 3.14 goes GA (2017-12)
>> > 3.9: EOL when 3.10 goes GA (2016-12)
>> > 3.10 [LTS]: EOL when 3.16 goes GA (2018-06)
>> > 3.11: EOL when 3.12 goes GA (2017-06)
>> > 3.12 [LTS]: EOL when 3.18 goes GA (2018-12)
>> > 3.13: EOL when 3.13 goes GA
>> > 3.14 [LTS]: EOL when 3.20 goes GA
>> >
>> > (one of the 3.x releases will be called 4.0, I do not want to predict
>> > when that is ready and leave that up to the 4.0 team)
>> >
>> > And, 'visualized':
>> >
>> > ----.
>> > 3.5 |
>> > -----------.
>> > 3.6 |
>> > ------------------.
>> > 3.7 |
>> > ----------------------------------------------.
>> > | 3.8 |
>> > '------.------.---------------------------'
>> > | 3.9 |
>> > : '------+-----------------------------------------.
>> > | 3.10 |
>> > : : '------.------.---------------------------'
>> > | 3.11 |
>> > : : : '------+-------------------------------------
>> > | 3.12
>> > : : : : '------.------.-----------------------
>> > | 3.13 |
>> > : : : : : '------+-----------------------
>> > | 3.14
>> > : : : : : : '------.------.---------
>> > | 3.15 |
>> > : : : : : : : '------+---------
>> > | 3.16
>> > : : : : : : : : '---------
>> >
>> > 2016-06 : 2016-12 : 2017-06 : 2017-12 : 2018-06
>> >
>> > 2016-09 2017-03 2017-09 2018-03
>> >
>> >
>> > ## Two stable/LTS versions, 1 year of bugfixes
>> >
>> > Looking at the diagram makes me wonder if this really is a sane approach
>> > that we can promise to our users. When 3.13 (or 4.x) gets released, we
>> > would have 4 active versions. At the moment we are already struggling
>> > with three active versions, so I doubt we can really do that. So, here a
>> > variation, and my suggestion to keep two stable releases instead of
>> > three:
>> >
>> > 3.5: EOL when 3.8 goes GA (2016-06)
>> > 3.6: EOL when 3.9 goes GA (2016-09)
>> > 3.7: EOL when 3.10 goes GA (2016-12)
>> > 3.8 [LTS]: EOL when 3.12 goes GA (2017-06)
>> > 3.9: EOL when 3.10 goes GA (2016-12)
>> > 3.10 [LTS]: EOL when 3.14 goes GA (2017-12)
>> > 3.11: EOL when 3.12 goes GA (2017-06)
>> > 3.12 [LTS]: EOL when 3.16 goes GA (2018-06)
>> > 3.13: EOL when 3.13 goes GA
>> > 3.14 [LTS]: EOL when 3.18 goes GA
>>
>> +1
>>
>> >
>> > (one of the 3.x releases will be called 4.0, I do not want to predict
>> > when that is ready and leave that up to the 4.0 team)
>>
>> Most probably it'd be around 3.12ish as per my prediction.
>>
>> >
>> > ----.
>> > 3.5 |
>> > -----------.
>> > 3.6 |
>> > ------------------.
>> > 3.7 |
>> > --------------------------------.
>> > | 3.8 |
>> > '------.------.-------------'
>> > | 3.9 |
>> > : '------+---------------------------.
>> > | 3.10 |
>> > : : '------.------.-------------'
>> > | 3.11 |
>> > : : : '------+---------------------------.
>> > | 3.12 |
>> > : : : : '------.------.-------------'
>> > | 3.13 |
>> > : : : : : '------+-----------------------
>> > | 3.14
>> > : : : : : : '------.------.---------
>> > | 3.15 |
>> > : : : : : : : '------+---------
>> > | 3.16
>> > : : : : : : : : '---------
>> >
>> > 2016-06 : 2016-12 : 2017-06 : 2017-12 : 2018-06
>> >
>> > 2016-09 2017-03 2017-09 2018-03
>> >
>> >
>> > Providing bugfixes for a LTS release for a year seems like a suitable
>> > middle road. If other projects/organizations want to support a certain
>> > version longer, they can do so themselves or step up and contribute a
>> > maintainer to our community.
>> >
>> >
>> > I expect that the number of patches in the stable releases get reduced A
>> > LOT compared to the current 3.7 version. With regular releases there
>> > should not be a need to backport complex patches or features.
>> > Maintainance of a stable release should be a very boring and simple
>> > task.
>>
>> What would be the frequency of the z stream releases for LTS? Should we
>> keep it flexible and decide based on the volume of incoming fixes?
>>
>> >
>> > Any suggestions for modifications or clarification needed before this
>> > can be transferred to a good looking webpage (by Amye?) on gluster.org?
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Niels
>>
>
>
> So I've caught up on (I think) - most of the discussions that have been
> happening in different places but I'm still missing a critical piece in
> here.
> LTS means Long Term Support, and Niels outlines this.
> Are we currently providing, as gluster.org, something that we would
> declare 'S' in LTS?
> How does that change/improve/decline with this new proposed process? We
> should discuss before moving this to -users/-devel.
>
> I'm also with Kaleb on his comments about how we establish a schedule.
> -- amye
>
> Amye Scavarda | amye at redhat.com | Gluster Community Lead
>
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>
--
Pranith
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