release plan for mdadm

["Tkaczyk, Mariusz" <mariusz.tkaczyk@linux.intel.com>]

Hi Jes,

It's been a while since last mdadm release. Mdadm-4.2 release that was
mentioned back in July does not happened yet. It's getting messy to
manage mdadm across multiple distributions.

Also, not all OSVs are willing to cherry-pick the patches, especially
for stable project - like mdadm, so only critical bugfixes are landing
in the distros.
As a result - new OSes has various forks of mdadm-4.1 and the difference
is growing with every backported patch. It leads us to situation where
those forks may have own bugs, caused by many missing bugfixes or wrongly
resolved merge conflicts.
To be honest - it becomes more and more problematic for us to track all
fixes in different supported distros.

We are searching for solutions for those problems and we are counting on
your support:
Short term - is there any way that we can help you to release next version
of mdadm soon?

Long term - what do you think about smaller, more frequent releases of
mdadm? Maybe twice a year is an option (similar to RedHat/Ubuntu
schedule)? That would be better for us and for vendors. They will need
to follow upstream instead resolving bugs reported by us or community.

The benefits will be gained by everyone. User will get up-to-date
software much faster, with minimal vendor input and modifications.
Mdadm bugs will be predictable across distros. We could help with
testing IMSM and basic functionality of native metadata.

What are your thoughts?
Regards,
Mariusz