Re: Supporting upcoming distribution releases

[Darren Hart <dvhart@linux.intel.com>]

On 07/12/2011 11:51 AM, Joshua Lock wrote:
> In our technical team call today we spent some time discussing how to
> support distribution releases that are due to happen around the time of
> Yocto 1.1.
> 
> Yocto 1.1 is scheduled for release on October 6th[1], the same month in
> which both Ubuntu and Fedora have new releases planned[2,3].
> OpenSUSE doesn't have a release scheduled until November 10th[4].
> 
> We should accommodate for these releases in our planning around 1.1 as
> we need to ensure that Yocto 1.1 can be used on the new versions of the
> chosen supported distros.
> 
> I had initially suggested we have people doing test and any relevant
> development around the beta cycles of Ubuntu and Fedora:
> 
> Fedora Beta (2011-09-20)
> Ubuntu (2011-09-01)
> In this time frame OpenSUSE will be on Milestone 5 (2011-09-01) which
> afaict (based on the 6th milestone being followed by an RC) should
> roughly equate to a beta.
> 
> However this aligns with our RC period at which point we may not want to
> accept large patches?
> 
> To meet our stabilise complete goal of August 29th we'd have to have
> people testing with:
> Fedora Alpha (2011-08-16)
> Ubuntu Alpha 3 (2011-08-04)
> OpenSUSE Milestone 4 (2011-08-11)
> 
> What are peoples thoughts on this?

At the very least a sanity test to know which sorts of issues we'll hit
with these would be valuable. However, I believe our policy is N-1, and
not N+1,N,N-1, so supporting not-yet released versions isn't something I
think we should spend too much time on. Minor fixes to support these
post release seem like good candidates for a point release.

> I think the onus for this testing
> will fall on engineers as the project QA is already pretty stretched. I
> have a tendency to update to early releases on at least one machine so
> will no doubt do some testing on Fedora but it would be nice to have a
> genuine strategy for this rather than relying on ad-hoc developer
> upgrades.


I personally do not upgrade my primary development machine to
pre-release distributions because I don't want those issues to derail me
from working on features. However, I could certainly kick off VMs
running whatever and set them building on one of our larger servers.

> 
> Final note: I'm left wondering if this emails contents also make sense
> as a wiki page?

Some sort of distro links for schedule page would be great. If people
want to share that they are testing the pre-release distros, that would
be useful, but we need to find a way to keep it concise and not into a
"getting it to work on XYZ" forum - although that would be useful a
separate page per distro.

> 
> Cheers,
> Joshua
> 
> 1. https://wiki.pokylinux.org/wiki/Yocto_1.1_Schedule
> 2. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricReleaseSchedule
> 3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/Schedule
> 4. http://en.opensuse.org/Roadmap

-- 
Darren Hart
Intel Open Source Technology Center
Yocto Project - Linux Kernel