Re: [Xen-devel] [Notes for xen summit 2018 design session] Process changes: is the 6 monthly release Cadence too short, Security Process, ...

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Jul 3, 2018, at 11:07 AM, Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jul 02, 2018 at 06:03:39PM +0000, Lars Kurth wrote:
>> We then had a discussion around why the positive benefits didn't materialize:
>> * Andrew and a few other believe that the model isn't broken, but that the 
>> issue is with how we 
>>   develop. In other words, moving to a 9 months model will *not* fix the 
>> underlying issues, but 
>>   merely provide an incentive not to fix them.
>> * Issues highlighted were:
>>   * 2-3 months stabilizing period is too long
> 
> I think one of the goals with the 6 month release cycle was to shrink
> the stabilizing period, but it didn't turn that way, and the
> stabilizing period is quite similar with a 6 or a 9 month release
> cycle.

Right, and I think this was something that wasn’t quite captured in Lars’ 
summary.

Everyone agreed:
1. The expectation was that a shorter release cycle would lead to shorter 
stabilization periods
2. This has not turned out to be the case, which means
3 At the moment, our “time doing development” to “time fixing bugs for a 
release” ratio is far too low.

One option to fix #3 is to go back to a 9-month cycle (or even a 12-month 
cycle), which would increase the “development” part of the equation.

But Doug was advocating trying instead to attack the “time fixing bugs” part of 
the equation.  He said he was a big fan “continuous delivery” — of being 
*always* ready to release.  And I think there’s a fair amount of agreement that 
one of the reasons it takes so long to stabilize is that our testing isn’t 
reliably catching bugs for whatever reason.

So a fair amount of the discussion was about what it would look like, and what 
it would take, to make it such that almost any push from osstest (or whatever 
testing infrasctructure we went with) could reasonably be released, and would 
have a very low expectation of having extraneous bugs.

I seem to recall saying that even if we agreed that moving to continuous 
delivery was a goal we wanted to pursue, we would still be several years away 
from achieving anything like it; and so in the mean time, it would probably 
make sense to move back to a 9-month cycle while we attack the problem.

 -George
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