Re: RFC: change to 6 months release cycle

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

On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 12:23 +0100, Wei Liu wrote:
> we can pick a stable tree every X releases etc etc.

I think switching to an LTS style model, i.e. only supporting 1/N for
longer than it takes to release the next major version might be interesting
to consider. I'm thinking e.g. of N=4 with a 6 month cycle.

I think some of our downstreams (i.e. distros) would like this, since it
gives them releases which are supported for a length of time more like
their own release cycles.

On a completely different tack, one way of looking at this is that there
are 2 releases in a given 18 month period with 9 month cycle vs 4 in the 6
month variant but that the amount of code change in that 18 month cycle is
approximately the same for both, such that backporting over 2x 9 month
releases vs 4x 6 month ones ends up getting about the same number of cherry
-pick conflicts. Together with our recent decision to not bother with rc's
for stable releases it may be that there is very little impact on the
actual work needed to cover the same absolute time span.

Ian.