Re: Xen 4.12 release planning

From: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
To: Julien Grall <julien.grall@arm.com>,
	Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com>,
	xen-devel <xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org>
Subject: Re: Xen 4.12 release planning
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2018 09:19:20 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <b8f9bd2e-46bb-1a31-e9ac-dbc42841f31f@citrix.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <0c25205b-b237-a7cd-aedf-45e7f86b3492@arm.com>

On 25/07/2018 09:15, Julien Grall wrote:
> Hi Juergen,
>
> On 25/07/18 08:19, Juergen Gross wrote:
>> Its time to plan the Xen 4.12 release dates.
>>
>> There have been concerns with the schedule of 6 months between releases,
>> as this scheme is leading to too many supported versions of Xen at a
>> time. The needed resources to backport bug fixes and security fixes as
>> well as doing the tests for all those releases are a limiting factor to
>> push out the current main release as well as point releases on time.
>>
>> After some discussions at the Xen developer summit, on xen-devel and
>> between the committers a slightly longer release cycle of 8 or 9 months
>> was suggested.
>>
>> With 18 months of full support and 36 months of security support the
>> number of concurrent supported releases will be the same with either 8
>> or 9 months release cycles, so I have chosen an 8 month cycle for now.
>> Having only 3 possible times in the year for a release will make it
>> easier to avoid major holiday seasons. >
>> In case there is no objection I'm planning Xen 4.12 with:
>>
>> * Last posting date: December 14th, 2018
>> * Hard code freeze: January 11th, 2019
>
> In general, you would expect western people to slow down during
> Christmas period and have to deal with a pile of e-mail just after New
> Year. So I think, this is not very convenient period for a code freeze.
>
> I usually take more holidays around Christmas and New Year. For this
> year, I will be on holidays from 21st December until the 13th January.
> This basically means my cut off for Arm patches will be 21st December
> or potentially few days before to avoid having the likely last minute
> rush.

Given that we have decided to switch to a difference cadence, it would
be prudent to work out when the best alignment of an 8-month cadence
would be, rather than having it 8 months from now.  If that means a
one-off shorter or longer cycle for 4.12 then so be it.

~Andrew

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