Re: release schedule change proposal

From: Flavio Leitner <fbl@redhat.com>
To: Kevin Traynor <ktraynor@redhat.com>
Cc: Thomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>,
	dev@dpdk.org, users@dpdk.org,
	 David Marchand <david.marchand@redhat.com>,
	ferruh.yigit@intel.com,  andrew.rybchenko@oktetlabs.ru,
	qi.z.zhang@intel.com, jerinj@marvell.com,  rasland@nvidia.com,
	Maxime Coquelin <maxime.coquelin@redhat.com>,
	gakhil@marvell.com, Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org>,
	"Richardson, Bruce" <bruce.richardson@intel.com>,
	mdr@ashroe.eu,  konstantin.ananyev@intel.com,
	olivier.matz@6wind.com,  honnappa.nagarahalli@arm.com,
	hemant.agrawal@nxp.com,  Aaron Conole <aconole@redhat.com>,
	ajit.khaparde@broadcom.com,  Ilya Maximets <i.maximets@ovn.org>,
	Ian Stokes <ian.stokes@intel.com>,
	 ovs-discuss <ovs-discuss@openvswitch.org>,
	Timothy Redaelli <tredaell@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: release schedule change proposal
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2021 10:48:34 -0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAGvBXKdfeGak+_Jfx1GfGh8N7WP3jCpnKQMx2NiBfLpOoP5Kww@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4b5ad9da-585d-37ef-198c-6c4e6d6ad9aa@redhat.com>

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Thanks Kevin for bringing this up.
See below.

On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 1:06 PM Kevin Traynor <ktraynor@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 15/11/2021 14:58, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> > For the last 5 years, DPDK was doing 4 releases per year,
> > in February, May, August and November (the LTS one):
> >       .02   .05   .08   .11 (LTS)
> >
> > This schedule has multiple issues:
> >       - clash with China's Spring Festival
> >       - too many rushes, impacting maintainers & testers
> >       - not much buffer, impacting proposal period
> >
> > I propose to switch to a new schedule with 3 releases per year:
> >       .03      .07      .11 (LTS)
> >
> > New LTS branch would start at the same time of the year as before.
> > There would be one less intermediate release during spring/summer:
> > .05 and .08 intermediate releases would become a single .07.
> > I think it has almost no impact for the users.
> > This change could be done starting next year.
> >
> > In details, this is how we could extend some milestones:
> >
> >       ideal schedule so far (in 13 weeks):
> >               proposal deadline: 4
> >               rc1 - API freeze: 5
> >               rc2 - PMD features freeze: 2
> >               rc3 - app features freeze: 1
> >               rc4 - last chance to fix: 1
> >               release: 0
> >
> >       proposed schedule (in 17 weeks):
> >               proposal deadline: 4
> >               rc1 - API freeze: 7
> >               rc2 - PMD features freeze: 3
> >               rc3 - app features freeze: 1
> >               rc4 - more fixes: 1
> >               rc5 - last chance buffer: 1
> >               release: 0
> >
> > Opinions?
> >
> >
>
> Someone else might comment if they spot something, but to me looks ok
> for RH distro and OVS project.
>

That is my impression as well.

>
> RH distro is also using DPDK .11 who's release date is not changing.
> (+cc Timothy/Flavio)
>

My concern is if patches would get delayed to be merged because of this
change, but I don't think that will be the case.

> For OVS project, it only integrates DPDK .11 release too and aims to do
> that by EOY to make the next OVS release. DPDK stable releases are
> integrated into older OVS branches when available. I don't think older
> OVS branch releases have a strict release schedule and having the latest
> stable DPDK release is not a blocker anyway. (+cc Ilya/Ian/ovs-discuss)
>

I agree.

fbl

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