Re: Notes from Xen BoF at Debconf15

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>]

On Tue, 2015-09-08 at 03:47 -0600, Jan Beulich wrote:
> > > > On 08.09.15 at 11:24, <ian.campbell@citrix.com> wrote:
> > Release cycle
> > =============
> > 
> > Waldi commented that the stable release cycle was too long. Would like
> > to see a release after any large security update.
> > 
> > We asked if the RCs for stable releases were valuable, the answer was
> > "not so much".
> > 
> > Waldi would prefer to avoid cherry-picking security fixes if possible.
> > 
> > We asked if we thought Xen stable releases could be added to Debian
> > point releases. Waldi thought they likely could be, citing the
> > inclusion of Linux stable releases in point releases.
> > 
> > Our stable releases follow a similar set of rules to Linux, we think
> > we implement them more faithfully (less feature or feature-like
> > backports)
> > 
> > ACTION: Talk to Jan about making changes to stable release process.
> 
> That's kind of the opposite of what we quite recently changed to
> (a [hopefully] more predictable four month cycle). Apart from the
> question what "large" is, doing a release after any large security
> update seems unreasonable to me (not only because of giving up
> the predictability, but also because of the overhead involved,
> which is there even if we ditched the RCs). I have to admit that I
> fail to see why Debian would be different than other distros, all
> cherry picking security fixes until a new stable release becomes
> available. If otoh other major distros voiced similar desires, I
> think we'd have to once again re-think our stable release cadence.

IIRC (hopefully Ian or someone else will correct me if not) the main
proposal to discuss with you was WRT the usefulness of the RCs for stable
releases, since it was felt they didn't provide much benefit to
downstreams.

IOW perhaps it would be just as useful to downstreams and less work for us
(mainly you I suppose) to do 0 or only 1 rc for a point release, based on
whatever is in the branch at the appropriate time. It might also avoid
various delays which the stable release process can currently suffer from
waiting for a push for each rc instead of just once (or maybe twice), which
in turn might help the release timing to be even more predictable.

Ian.