Re: release schedule change proposal

[Ilya Maximets <i.maximets@ovn.org>]

On 11/15/21 17:06, Kevin Traynor wrote:
> On 15/11/2021 14:58, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
>> For the last 5 years, DPDK was doing 4 releases per year,
>> in February, May, August and November (the LTS one):
>>     .02   .05   .08   .11 (LTS)
>>
>> This schedule has multiple issues:
>>     - clash with China's Spring Festival
>>     - too many rushes, impacting maintainers & testers
>>     - not much buffer, impacting proposal period
>>
>> I propose to switch to a new schedule with 3 releases per year:
>>     .03      .07      .11 (LTS)
>>
>> New LTS branch would start at the same time of the year as before.
>> There would be one less intermediate release during spring/summer:
>> .05 and .08 intermediate releases would become a single .07.
>> I think it has almost no impact for the users.
>> This change could be done starting next year.
>>
>> In details, this is how we could extend some milestones:
>>
>>     ideal schedule so far (in 13 weeks):
>>         proposal deadline: 4
>>         rc1 - API freeze: 5
>>         rc2 - PMD features freeze: 2
>>         rc3 - app features freeze: 1
>>         rc4 - last chance to fix: 1
>>         release: 0
>>
>>     proposed schedule (in 17 weeks):
>>         proposal deadline: 4
>>         rc1 - API freeze: 7
>>         rc2 - PMD features freeze: 3
>>         rc3 - app features freeze: 1
>>         rc4 - more fixes: 1
>>         rc5 - last chance buffer: 1
>>         release: 0
>>
>> Opinions?
>>
>>
> 
> Someone else might comment if they spot something, but to me looks ok for RH distro and OVS project.
> 
> RH distro is also using DPDK .11 who's release date is not changing. (+cc Timothy/Flavio)
> 
> For OVS project, it only integrates DPDK .11 release too and aims to do that by EOY to make the next OVS release. DPDK stable releases are integrated into older OVS branches when available. I don't think older OVS branch releases have a strict release schedule and having the latest stable DPDK release is not a blocker anyway. (+cc Ilya/Ian/ovs-discuss)
> 

I agree that this schedule change doesn't change much for OVS.

One thing to highlight though: Change of main release schema
seems to directly impact schedule of stable releases.
In this case, interval between DPDK stable releases increases
from 3+ to 4+ months.  This might be a long time to wait for
certain bug fixes, especially if OVS needs to skip one of the
DPDK stable releases due to issues introduced in it.
Anyway, doesn't sound like something critical to me.

Bets regards, Ilya Maximets.