Re: Xen 4.3 release planning proposal

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>]

On 29/08/12 21:53, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
>> From: George Dunlap [mailto:George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com]
>> Subject: [Xen-devel] Xen 4.3 release planning proposal
>>
>> Hello everyone!  With the completion of our first few release candidates
>> for 4.2, it's time to look forward and start planning for the 4.3
>> release.  I've volunteered to step up and help coordinate the release
>> for this cycle.
>>
>> The 4.2 release cycle this time has been nearly a year and a half.
>> One of the problems with having such a long release is that people who
>> get in features early have to wait a long time for that feature to be
>> in a published version; they then have to wait even longer for it to
>> be part of a released distribution.  Historically the cycle has been
>> around 9 months, but this has not been made explicit.  Many people
>> (including myself) think that the 9 month release cycle was a good
>> cadence that we should aim for.
>>
>> So I propose that we move to a time-based release schedule.  Rather
>> than aiming for a release date, I propose that we aim to do a "feature
>> freeze" six months after the 4.2 release -- that would be around March
>> 1, 2013.  That way we'll probably end up releasing in 9 months' time,
>> around June 2013.  This is one of the things we can discuss at the Dev
>> Meeting before the Xen Summit next week.  If you have other opinions,
>> please let us know.
> Hi George --
>
> (Sorry if I missed relevant discussion on this... I'm way behind
> on xen-devel.)
>
> Just a thought...
>
> Maybe it is time to move to match the well-known highly-greased
> Linux kernel release process?  This would include, for example, a short
> window for new functionality and a xen-next for pre-window shaking
> out and merging (of new functionality) and testing.  As has
> been pointed out, xen-unstable is, well, unstable for far too long.
>
> It may not be necessary to aggressively match Linus' 8-9 week release
> cycle or weekly rcN releases, but the core process is known to
> work very well, is reasonably well documented, and will be familiar
> to many in the open source community.
>
> Dan

And in line with this, having a more formal approach/system for
backporting bugfixes would be fantastic.

~Andrew

>
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-- 
Andrew Cooper - Dom0 Kernel Engineer, Citrix XenServer
T: +44 (0)1223 225 900, http://www.citrix.com