[dpdk-dev] DPDK short term stable maintenance

[Kevin Traynor <ktraynor@redhat.com>]

Hi All,

This is about short term stable maintenance, ~3 months based on
n.02/05/08 DPDK. It is **not** referring/impacting DPDK LTS, maintained
for ~2 years based on n.11 DPDK.

The effort and usefulness of short term stable maintenance was raised
previously and in the last DPDK Release meeting [1], so sending mail to
kick off discussion here...

Currently DPDK 19.02 stable branch has no maintainer and it has been
difficult to get the companies to validate DPDK 18.08.1 RC. There seems
to be a lack of appetite in the community for short term stables, or at
least for all of them, and hence giving resources for helping them.

It could be that users are either moving from latest bleeding edge
master release to the next, or settling on DPDK LTS for an extended
period of time - I'm just speculating, but IMHO that would not be a bad
thing.

So what to do with short term stables? Some choices could be:

- continue with short term stables for n.02/05/08
- ad-hoc support for short term stables where community have an interest
in a particular one
- have a maintainer to backport fixes on a public branch, but have no
releases, or have unvalidated/best effort validated releases
- no short term stable branches/releases

Probably there's other ideas too. Obviously most of the above would need
resources from the community to proceed. One advantage of not having
short term stables is that there might be more resources available for
maintenance/validation of master and LTS DPDK releases.

Thoughts?

thanks,
Kevin.

[1] https://mails.dpdk.org/archives/dev/2019-March/126006.html