Re: Xen 4.16: Proposed release manager and schedule

From: Ian Jackson <iwj@xenproject.org>
To: Julien Grall <julien@xen.org>
Cc: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>,
	xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org,
	George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@citrix.com>,
	committers@xenproject.org
Subject: Re: Xen 4.16: Proposed release manager and schedule
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2021 14:38:21 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <24868.63053.121473.979573@mariner.uk.xensource.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <db112874-eb0a-c9ad-4509-6d048b056038@xen.org>

Julien Grall writes ("Re: Xen 4.16: Proposed release manager and schedule"):
> On 19/08/2021 16:36, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > One option is to slip the whole release, in the expectation (hope!) of
> > collecting more input.  In practical terms because of the impact of
> > Christmas and New Year on many of our contributors, a month's slip now
> > is probably more like two months' slip to the release.  So arguably
> > for this to be worth it, we ought to plan to slip 2 months now and
> > release in February.
> 
> A 2 months slip looks appealling to get more features. But it means we 
> will end up to split all the future releases.

No, it wouldn't, really.  Our usual release interval is 9 months.
9+2 = 11, so the result would be a one month longer release, if we
delayed this one by 2 months.  In practice it is always a bit of a
struggle to keep things to time (that's the way things are set up with
this system) so I think this is well within our usual tolerances.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not arguing in favour of this option.
But I wanted to present it as a reasonable option the community might
want to consider.

Jan, do you have an opnion about this ?  Do you expect that a 2-3
month slip would help with your review backlog, bearing in mind the
people who are currently on leave and when they'll be back ?

If no-one wishes to argue in favour of the longer slip I think we
should go with the normal plan.

> At the moment, my preference is to stick with the release in December. 
> We don't have major contributions checked in yet on Arm, but there is a 
> chance to have a couple of them with the current schedule on Arm.
> 
> We also have a collection of bug fixes which makes Arm running better on 
> some platform.
> 
> So I think the release would still be worthwhile even in the worst case 
> where nothing major is merged.

Thanks for the opinion.

Can I at least get a +1 from someone for appointing me as RM
for 4.16 ? :-)

Thanks,
Ian.