It would be good to gather data on who the users will be and what they expect out of it. Beam users appear to be tech savvy early adopters, and Enterprise users of that class frequently maintain their own patch stacks of backported fixes and features off of releases. I've been in that world before as a user (of other open source projects but not of Beam). It wouldn't surprise me if several of those patch stacks are on github forks of Beam. Hopefully we can track some of these down as an example of where we can reduce pain for our users.
Andrew On Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 1:56 AM Etienne Chauchot <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > I agree that LTS releases are a good thing for users especially because of > the argument given by Ahmet (enterprise users). Just 2 comments: > - It will require a good amount of backports > - The LTS frequency needs to be flexible IMHO but we must make sure the > period between two LTS is acceptable. > > Etienne > > Le jeudi 16 août 2018 à 23:13 +0200, Alexey Romanenko a écrit : > > On 16 Aug 2018, at 21:10, Robert Bradshaw <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 7:56 PM Ahmet Altay <[email protected]> wrote: > > I agree with this assessment and the risk. I proposed every Nth as a way > to keep LTS releases coming out. I was concerned about not making any LTS > releases for a long time. > > > Yeah. We could certainly have every Nth release by default to keep the > cadence up, but note that it's very flexible. Your wording below > sounds fine to me. > > > This sounds reasonable for me too, thanks. > > > How about something like: > > "The community will mark some releases LTS releases (based on the factors > such as the number of LTS releases currently in flight, and whether the > accumulated feature set from the last LTS provides significant value to > upgrade). There will be at least one new LTS release in a 12 month period." > > I prepared a PR draft for the above change ( > https://github.com/apache/beam-site/pull/539). I will be OOO for a few > weeks, feel free to edit/merge my PR. I can also do this when I am back. > > > > Generally, x.0.0 releases are not used by the target audiences of LTS > releases, so I would not plan on it (by default at least) becoming an LTS > candidate. > > > > I agree with Robert. We can let the community decide based on how we feel > at that time, but unlikely in my opinion. > > > > > On Thursday, August 16, 2018, Alexey Romanenko <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > Ahmet, thank you for raising this topic, I think it defenitevly makes > sense to have LTS releases, especially for enterprise users. The other > potential solution could be patching only last 2-3 releases but, with a > goal of 8 releases per year, it might cover quite a short time slice. > > The only question for me - do we consider major release (3.0 will be the > next one) as LTS release by default despite of the its number in release > sequence? > > On 15 Aug 2018, at 20:36, Pablo Estrada <[email protected]> wrote: > > No, I think that sounds good : ) > > On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 11:34 AM Ahmet Altay <[email protected]> wrote: > > > In the PR, I proposed starting with the next (2.7.0) release. I should > have made it more clear. One way of tracking would be having a table, or > perhaps adding this information to the downloads page. Do you have any > ideas? > > > On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 11:28 AM, Pablo Estrada <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > Thanks Ahmet for looking into this. I have a follow-up question. Have you > thought about the next few releases, and which one will be the first LTS > release? Also, how should we track this? > -P. > > On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 11:24 AM Ahmet Altay <[email protected]> wrote: > > > PR is reviewed and merged. Thank you all for the input. If you did not > have a chance to share your feedback, please propose any modifications that > you would like to see. I will be more than happy to make changes that would > allows us to serve our users better. > > On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 4:32 PM, Ahmet Altay <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Still waiting for any additional user feedback to come. I added reviewers > to the PR. Unless there is objections or additional feedback I would like > to go ahead with this version as it is. Modifications after that would > always be welcome. > > On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 2:06 PM, Rafael Fernandez <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > I think this will great for the project! It's worked well for others (such > as Ubuntu). I like that this remains compatible with our desire to release > every six weeks, while keeping the support/patch load manageable. > > Release: +1 single process. This is just a statement of what we commit to > service. > > On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 12:31 PM Ahmet Altay <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I was not proposing any additional changes to the release process. If we > think that release process could be improved it would make sense to apply > it to all releases. > > On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 11:01 AM, Lukasz Cwik <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Charles, I would keep the process the same with respect to releasing. > > On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 11:00 AM Charles Chen <[email protected]> wrote: > > > (sending to the dev@ list thread as this is more relevant here than users@ > ) > > Will we be using a different / potentially more rigorous process for > releasing LTS releases? Or do we feel that any validations that could > possibly be done should already be incorporated into each release? > > On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 10:57 AM Ahmet Altay <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Update: > > I sent out an email to user@ to collect their feedback [1]. I will > encourage everyone here to collect feedback from the other channels > available to you. To facilitate the discussion I drafted my proposal in a > PR [2]. > > Ahmet > > [1] > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/7d890d6ed221c722a95d9c773583450767b79ee0c0c78f48a56c7eba@%3Cuser.beam.apache.org%3E > [2] https://github.com/apache/beam-site/pull/537 > > On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 5:20 PM, Lukasz Cwik <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Thanks, I can see the reasoning for LTS releases based upon some > enterprise customers needs. > > Forgot about the 2.1.1 Python release. Thanks for pointing that out. > > On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 4:47 PM Ahmet Altay <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 12:33 PM, Lukasz Cwik <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I like the ideas that your proposing but am wondering what value if any do > supporting LTS releases add? We maintain semantic versioning and I would > expect that most users would be using the latest released version if not > the release just before that. There is likely a long tail of users who will > use a specific version and are unlikely to ever upgrade. > > > > I believe there is a category of enterprise users who would continue to > use a specific version as long as they know they can get support for it. > This usually stems from the need to have a stable environment. There is > also the aspect of validating new product before using. I know some > companies have validation cycles longer than 6 weeks. They will still > upgrade but they would like to upgrade much less frequently. > > I was hoping that defining LTS releases will signal these types of users > what releases are worth upgrading to if they have a high cost of upgrading. > > This comes from my anecdotal evidence and I may be wrong. > > > > I believe it would be valuable to ask our users what is most important to > them with respect to the policy (after we have discussed it a little bit) > as well since ultimately our goal is to help our users. > > > > I agree with this. Since I am referring to enterprise users primarily I > think some of it will require the companies here to collect that feedback. > > > This could then be documented and we could provide guidance to customers > as to how to reach out to the group for big bugs. Also note that Apache has > a security policy[1] in place which we should direct users to. > > > > I think document what could be expected of Beam in terms of support would > be very valuable by itself. It will also help us figure out what we could > drop. For example in the recent discussion to drop old API docs, there was > no clear guidance on which SDKs are still supported and should have their > API docs hosted. > > I think we reference to the Apache security policy on our website. If not > I agree, we should add a reference to it. > > > > Also, we don't have any experience in patching a release as we haven't yet > done one patch version bump. All issues that have been brought up were > always fixed in the next minor version bump. > > > > I agree. There was the Python 2.1.1 but that is the only example I could > remember. > > > > 1: http://www.apache.org/security/ > > > > > On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 11:50 AM Pablo Estrada <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I think this all sounds reasonable, and I think it would be a good story > for our users. We don't have much experience with patching releases, but I > guess it's a matter of learning and improving over time. > -P. > > On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 9:04 PM Ahmet Altay <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi all, > > I would like us to clarify the life cycle of Beam releases a little bit > more for our users. I think we increased the predictability significantly > by agreeing to a release cadence and kudos to everyone on that. As a follow > up to that I would like to address the following problem: > > It is unclear for a user of Beam how long an existing version will be > supported. And if it will be supported at all, what does that support mean. > (This is especially an important problem for users who would like to use > stable versions and care less about being on the cutting edge.) > > Our current state is: > > - With our agreed release cadence Beam makes 8 releases a year. > - We have precedence for patching released versions for major issues. > - Patching all existing releases at any point (even patching a year full > of 8 releases) will be significant work. > > With the problem and the information, I have the following proposal to > define the life cycle of existing releases. > > - Define what is a major issue with Beam. (For example this could be high > severity security issues and high risk data integrity issues.) > - Have a concept of long term support (LTS) releases. Designate every 4th > release as an LTS release (~6 months). > - Deprecate non-LTS releases the moment any new Beam release is out. Never > patch non-LTS releases. > - Deprecate LTS releases after a new LTS release comes out. Patch any LTS > release within 1 year of its initial release date. > - Add the above information to our website. > > I think this proposal would give clear information to our users about what > they can expect from us, and reduce our burden to maintain existing > releases. > > I also would like to state my assumptions: > > - Releases will happen not because of a policy but because there are > volunteers willing to do it. This proposal is only a framework for those > volunteers to take action. If Beam does not support its releases, with or > without a policy, we will reduce the trust of our users. > - After we agreed to have a regular release cadence we started to see > improvements towards having regular releases even though we did not > perfectly hit 6 weeks mark each time. I do expect the same here: an > improvement in the direction of user happiness even if we cannot be perfect. > > What do you think? > > Ahmet > > > -- > Got feedback? go/pabloem-feedback > <https://goto.google.com/pabloem-feedback> > > > > > > > > -- > Got feedback? go/pabloem-feedback > <https://goto.google.com/pabloem-feedback> > > > > -- > Got feedback? go/pabloem-feedback > <https://goto.google.com/pabloem-feedback> > > >
