Re: [Qemu-devel] Release plan for 0.12.0

[Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>]

On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:03:23 +0200
Fred Leeflang <fredl@dutchie.org> wrote:

> 2009/9/30 Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>
> 
> > Luiz Capitulino wrote:
> >
> >> On Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:54:53 -0500
> >> Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> I think aiming for early to mid-December would give us roughly a 3 month
> >>> cycle and would align well with some of the Linux distribution cycles.  I'd
> >>> like to limit things to a single -rc that lasted only for about a week.
> >>>  This is enough time to fix most of the obvious issues I think.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>  How do you plan to do it? I mean, are you going to create a separate
> >> branch
> >> or make master the -rc?
> >>
> >>  Creating a separate branch (which is what we do today, iiuc) makes it
> >> get less attention, freezing master for a certain period is the best
> >> way to stabilize.
> >>
> >>  Is this what you had in mind?
> >>
> >>
> > What do people think?
> >
> > One reason I branch is because some people care a bit less about releases
> > so it makes the process non-disruptive to them.  If the other maintainers
> > agreed though, I would certainly like to have the master branch essentially
> > frozen for the week before the release.
> >
> 
> freezing is only neccesary if you need time to gather all the patches, build
> and test them together etc. 

 Not exactly, freezing is done to stop/slowdown writing new code and focus
on bug fixing for a period of time.

 This is not only needed for a release, but projects should always try
to find the best balance between 'number of bugs' and 'feature addition rate'.

> If you don't feel you or the developers need to
> do that to get a reliable release out I think it only halts developers
> without any clear reason to do so. Calling 'attention' to a release is not a
> clear reason IMO.

 Having a functional and relatively stable release is not only
important, but it's the ultimate goal IMO.

 Obviously we should take care not to take extremes. No QEMU release
will be 100% bug free, that's why we have stables.