Re: GRUB release schedule?

[Josef Bacik <jbacik@fb.com>]

On 07/20/2015 11:22 AM, Peter Jones wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> Is there a plan for when upcoming GNU GRUB releases will happen?
>
> As far as I can tell, the last official release on
> ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grub/ was 2.00 on 28-Jun-2012, and the last beta
> on http://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/grub/ for the next version was
> 2.02~beta2 on 24-Dec-2013 .  There are (give or take) 471 patches
> committed since that beta 18 months ago.
>
> In the mean time, nearly every Linux distro is shipping a package
> derived from the 2.02~beta2 release plus some number of patches,
> some from the upstream repo and some not, and it's cumbersome to rectify
> which ones aren't upstream vs which ones have been fixed upstream with
> /nearly/ the same patch, etc., with all the noise of so many patches
> since the release.
>
> I suspect this would be better for a lot of GRUB users if releases
> happened on a regular schedule, or if, relatively often (say once or
> twice per year), a release schedule that spans several weeks and
> organized some kind of alpha->beta->release progression were decided
> upon and followed.
>
> So, can we make a release process that happens according to some regular
> cadence?  What needs to be done to make regular releases happen?  Going
> for years with the patch volume GRUB sees without doing a release is
> really not good for anybody.
>

I'd like to +1 this.  I think the tests are important for sure, but 
there's no reason we can't set a release cadence and at least cut an 
-rc1 and spend some time fixing up the test failures.  Facebook is going 
to be using grub2 in our provisioning environment, we would like to have 
official builds rather than running from git.  Thanks,

Josef