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Re: [Xen-devel] Xen release cycle revisited



Hi Juergen,

On 18/12/17 16:10, Juergen Gross wrote:
On 18/12/17 16:57, Julien Grall wrote:
Hi George,

On 18/12/17 14:56, George Dunlap wrote:
On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 2:54 PM, Juergen Gross <jgross@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 14/12/17 14:13, Juergen Gross wrote:
On 14/12/17 13:43, Julien Grall wrote:


On 14/12/17 11:38, Juergen Gross wrote:
On 14/12/17 12:28, Julien Grall wrote:


On 14/12/17 07:56, Juergen Gross wrote:
Hi all,

Hi Juergen,

I would recommend to CC committers on that thread, so your thread
don't
get lost in the xen-devel meanders :).

with 4.10 more or less finished it is time to plan for the next
release
4.11. Since 4.7 we are using a 6 month release cycle [1]
targeting to
release in June and December.

While this worked reasonably well for 4.7, 4.8 and 4.9 we had some
difficulties with 4.10: bad luck with security patch timing
shifted the
4.10 release more towards mid of December. Doing thorough
testing of
the
latest security patches and trying to release at least 10 days
before
Christmas seemed to be almost mutually exclusive goals.

So what do we learn from this experience?

1. Should we think about other planned release dates (e.g. May and
       November - would that collide with any holiday season)?

2. Shouldn't we have tried to include the latest security
patches in
       4.10, resulting in the need for 4.10.1 at once?

I am not sure to understand this questions here.

Hmm, yes, this is somehow garbled.

Next try:

2. Should we have released 4.10 without those late security patches,
      resulting in the need for 4.10.1 at once?

We were not ready to release on the 2nd December. This would have put
the release date too close to XSAs published date. The risk was
that the
security issues announcement would overshadow the release
announcement.

Okay. So for me it seems as if a planned release early December is the
main problem: either the release slips no more than 2 weeks or it will
slip for more than 5 weeks.

Having only 2 weeks of spare time is a major risk.

What I'd like to suggest is to move the target release dates to early
May and November. Or would this create a conflict with any holiday
season we care about?

I think one concern was that if we release in early May, the feature
freeze would be early March, which will often be right after Chinese
New Year (a bit like having the feature freeze on January 5).

But having the feature freeze up shortly after a major holiday is
probably less bad than having the release shortly before a major
holiday (as we have had this time).
Yu would unofficially put the feature freeze for anyone "affected" by
the major holidays.

So it might be wiser to move the feature freeze before the holidays.
This would help planning and avoid adding frustration around the feature
freeze.

Hmm, really?

So I should freeze one or two weeks earlier just because someone _might_
be on vacation? So I would eventually delay a major feature from someone
in Europe because of Chinese holidays? I don't think this is a good
idea.
Chinese NY is quite important in China. Knowing that they are contributing a lot to Xen, it is not only someone but an important part of the contributors.

Any major holidays affecting Europe/US is likely going to affect the release. Mostly because the a major part of the maintainers are in Europe/US today.

So you would delay feature from someone in China because of European/US holidays. How this would this be fine compare to the invert?

Cheers,

--
Julien Grall

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