Hi Jan,

Thanks for your comments. Please check mine inline

> From: Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>
> > I agree that we need to version our releases. In Debian there are point versions, but I don't think we need to follow
> that. Maybe we can just use a number such as the date of the release (eg. 20200519 <-- yearmonthday).
> 
> Or the more common pattern "2020.05".
> 
> How often should we release? What would be the required quality criteria?

Perhaps one option is to release at the same time the CIP kernel is released, that is every few weeks
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/cip/linux-cip.git/refs/tags
We can start with "no regressions" as the most basic quality criteria.

> > Some questions regarding versioning:
> >     * should we also store metadata associated with a release?
> > 	* a package list manifest for each release (dpkg -l)?
> >          * the cip-core branch and commit
> >          * the cip-kernel branch and commit
> >          * md5sum of the image
> 
> When using a meta layer for generating the image - like isar-cip-core -,
> almost everything is described that way already, except for...
> 
> >     * do we need repository management infrastructure?
> >         * mirror part of the debian repository (only the packages that we need)
> >         * create snapshots for each release including the source code packages
> >
> 
> ...the binary packages. So the second piece would be a versioned repo
> for those.
> 
> That can be snapshot.debian.org, like we do in [1][2], but that this not
> a very reliable source (took me hours recently to rebuild [1] from
> there, you want a better mirror).
> 
> > Storing metadata should not be too difficult, just add some script code to gitlab-ci.
> >
> > Keeping snapshots would require much more work and resources. I think this is not necessary since we are not going
> to rebuild images, and if we wanted we could do it somehow from the package list manifest and the upstream Debian
> ftp servers.
> 
> The repo is required if we want to be serious regarding releases.

OK, in that case we would need to setup an AWS instance with enough storage ( 1 or more Terabytes), and httpd server, and a repository mirror/snapshot management tool such as [aptly]( https://www.aptly.info/).

Thanks,
Daniel

> 
> Jan
> 
> [1] https://github.com/siemens/meta-iot2050
> [2]
> https://github.com/siemens/meta-iot2050/blob/master/conf/distro/debian-snapshot.list
> 
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