Re: Xen 4.12 release planning

[Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com>]

On 27/07/18 00:13, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Jul 2018, Juergen Gross wrote:
>> Its time to plan the Xen 4.12 release dates.
>>
>> There have been concerns with the schedule of 6 months between releases,
>> as this scheme is leading to too many supported versions of Xen at a
>> time. The needed resources to backport bug fixes and security fixes as
>> well as doing the tests for all those releases are a limiting factor to
>> push out the current main release as well as point releases on time.
>>
>> After some discussions at the Xen developer summit, on xen-devel and
>> between the committers a slightly longer release cycle of 8 or 9 months
>> was suggested.
>>
>> With 18 months of full support and 36 months of security support the
>> number of concurrent supported releases will be the same with either 8
>> or 9 months release cycles, so I have chosen an 8 month cycle for now.
>> Having only 3 possible times in the year for a release will make it
>> easier to avoid major holiday seasons.
>>
>> In case there is no objection I'm planning Xen 4.12 with:
>>
>> * Last posting date: December 14th, 2018
>> * Hard code freeze: January 11th, 2019
>> * Release: March 7th, 2019
>>
>> Release of Xen 4.13 would then be early November 2019, 4.14 at early
>> July 2020.
> 
> Given the holdidays season (it is not just Julien going on vacation but
> pretty much everybody), wouldn't it be better to move the hard code
> freeze by a couple of weeks? For instance Jan 25th? We can still keep
> the release date as Mar 7th, there should be still enough time?

I don't think planning with a 6 week freeze period is a good idea. The
last releases took longer than 2 months.

We could slip the complete release by 2 weeks, of course. In this case
I'd move the last posting date to January. So something like:

* Last posting date: January 11th, 2019
* Hard code freeze: January 25th, 2019
* Release: March 21st, 2019

Risks for that schedule are:
- last posting date short after holiday season - is that really a
  problem?
- Chinese new year rather soon after start of freeze period
- planned release date rather close to eastern

Opinions?


Juergen

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