Re: Xen 4.16: Proposed release manager and schedule

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 24.08.2021 15:38, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Julien Grall writes ("Re: Xen 4.16: Proposed release manager and schedule"):
>> On 19/08/2021 16:36, Ian Jackson wrote:
>>> One option is to slip the whole release, in the expectation (hope!) of
>>> collecting more input.  In practical terms because of the impact of
>>> Christmas and New Year on many of our contributors, a month's slip now
>>> is probably more like two months' slip to the release.  So arguably
>>> for this to be worth it, we ought to plan to slip 2 months now and
>>> release in February.
>>
>> A 2 months slip looks appealling to get more features. But it means we 
>> will end up to split all the future releases.
> 
> No, it wouldn't, really.  Our usual release interval is 9 months.
> 9+2 = 11, so the result would be a one month longer release, if we
> delayed this one by 2 months.  In practice it is always a bit of a
> struggle to keep things to time (that's the way things are set up with
> this system) so I think this is well within our usual tolerances.
> 
> For the avoidance of doubt, I am not arguing in favour of this option.
> But I wanted to present it as a reasonable option the community might
> want to consider.
> 
> Jan, do you have an opnion about this ?  Do you expect that a 2-3
> month slip would help with your review backlog, bearing in mind the
> people who are currently on leave and when they'll be back ?

It's extremely hard to predict whether 2-3 months would help, or by
how much. I wanted to make the "slim" release aspect explicit, but
I didn't mean to question the schedule unless there would have been
signals that many care about a more "feature rich" 4.16.

>> At the moment, my preference is to stick with the release in December. 
>> We don't have major contributions checked in yet on Arm, but there is a 
>> chance to have a couple of them with the current schedule on Arm.
>>
>> We also have a collection of bug fixes which makes Arm running better on 
>> some platform.
>>
>> So I think the release would still be worthwhile even in the worst case 
>> where nothing major is merged.
> 
> Thanks for the opinion.
> 
> 
> Can I at least get a +1 from someone for appointing me as RM
> for 4.16 ? :-)

Sure: +1

Jan