I agree with retiring 2.7 as the LTS family. Based on my experience with users 2.7 does not have a particularly high adoption and as pointed out has known critical issues. Declaring another LTS pending demand sounds reasonable but how are we going to gauge this demand?
+Yifan Zou <yifan...@google.com> +Alan Myrvold <amyrv...@google.com> on the tooling question as well. Unless we address the tooling problem it seems difficult to feasibly maintain LTS versions over time. On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 3:45 PM Austin Bennett <whatwouldausti...@gmail.com> wrote: > To be clear, I was picking on - or reminding us of - the promise: I don't > have a strong personal need/desire (at least currently) for LTS to exist. > Though, worth ensuring we live up to what we keep on the website. And, > without an active LTS, probably something we should take off the site? > > On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 1:33 PM Pablo Estrada <pabl...@google.com> wrote: > >> +Łukasz Gajowy <lukasz.gaj...@polidea.com> had at some point thought of >> setting up jenkins jobs without coupling them to the state of the repo >> during the last Seed Job. It may be that that improvement can help test >> older LTS-type releases? >> >> On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 1:11 PM Robert Bradshaw <rober...@google.com> >> wrote: >> >>> In many ways the 2.7 LTS was trying to flesh out the process. I think >>> we learned some valuable lessons. It would have been good to push out >>> something (even if it didn't have everything we wanted) but that is >>> unlikely to be worth pursuing now (and 2.7 should probably be retired >>> as LTS and no longer recommended). >>> >>> I agree that it does not seem there is strong demand for an LTS at >>> this point. I would propose that we keep 2.16, etc. as potential >>> candidates, but only declare one as LTS pending demand. The question >>> of how to keep our tooling stable (or backwards/forwards compatible) >>> is a good one, especially as we move to drop Python 2.7 in 2020 (which >>> could itself be a driver for an LTS). >>> >>> On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 12:27 PM Kenneth Knowles <k...@apache.org> >>> wrote: >>> > >>> > Yes, I pretty much dropped 2.7.1 release process due to lack of >>> interest. >>> > >>> > There are known problems so that I cannot recommend anyone to use >>> 2.7.0, yet 2.7 it is the current LTS family. So my work on 2.7.1 was >>> philosophical. I did not like the fact that we had a designated LTS family >>> with no usable releases. >>> > >>> > But many backports were proposed to block 2.7.1 and took a very long >>> time to get contirbutors to implement the backports. I ended up doing many >>> of them just to move it along. This indicates a lack of interest to me. The >>> problem is that we cannot really use a strict cut off date as a way to >>> ensure people do the important things and skip the unimportant things, >>> because we do know that the issues are critical. >>> > >>> > And, yes, the fact that Jenkins jobs are separately evolving but >>> pretty tightly coupled to the repo contents is a serious problem that I >>> wish we had fixed. So verification of each PR was manual. >>> > >>> > Altogether, I still think LTS is valuable to have as a promise to >>> users that we will backport critical fixes. I would like to keep that >>> promise and continue to try. Things that are rapidly changing (which >>> something always will be) just won't have fixes backported, and that seems >>> OK. >>> > >>> > Kenn >>> > >>> > On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 10:59 AM Maximilian Michels <m...@apache.org> >>> wrote: >>> >> >>> >> An LTS only makes sense if we end up patching the LTS, which so far we >>> >> have never done. There has been work done in backporting fixes, see >>> >> https://github.com/apache/beam/commits/release-2.7.1 but the effort >>> was >>> >> never completed. The main reason I believe were complications with >>> >> running the evolved release scripts against old Beam versions. >>> >> >>> >> Now that the portability layer keeps maturing, it makes me optimistic >>> >> that we might have a maintained LTS in the future. >>> >> >>> >> -Max >>> >> >>> >> On 19.09.19 08:40, Ismaël Mejía wrote: >>> >> > The fact that end users never asked AFAIK in the ML for an LTS and >>> for >>> >> > a subsequent minor release of the existing LTS shows IMO the low >>> >> > interest on having a LTS. >>> >> > >>> >> > We still are heavily iterating in many areas (portability/schema) >>> and >>> >> > I am not sure users (and in particular users of open source runners) >>> >> > get a big benefit of relying on an old version. Maybe this is the >>> >> > moment to reconsider if having a LTS does even make sense given (1) >>> >> > that our end user facing APIs are 'mostly' stable (even if many >>> still >>> >> > called @Experimental). (2) that users get mostly improvements on >>> >> > runners translation and newer APIs with a low cost just by updating >>> >> > the version number, and (3) that in case of any regression in an >>> >> > intermediary release we still can do a minor release even if we have >>> >> > not yet done so, let's not forget that the only thing we need to do >>> >> > this is enough interest to do the release from the maintainers. >>> >> > >>> >> > >>> >> > On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 12:00 AM Valentyn Tymofieiev >>> >> > <valen...@google.com> wrote: >>> >> >> >>> >> >> I support nominating 2.16.0 as LTS release since in has robust >>> Python 3 support compared with prior releases, and also for reasons of >>> pending Python 2 deprecation. This has been discussed before [1]. As Robert >>> pointed out in that thread, LTS nomination in Beam is currently >>> retroactive. If we keep the retroactive policy, the question is how long we >>> should wait for a release to be considered "safe" for nomination. Looks >>> like in case of 2.7.0 we waited a month, see [2,3]. >>> >> >> >>> >> >> Thanks, >>> >> >> Valentyn >>> >> >> >>> >> >> [1] >>> https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/eba6caa58ea79a7ecbc8560d1c680a366b44c531d96ce5c699d41535@%3Cdev.beam.apache.org%3E >>> >> >> [2] https://beam.apache.org/blog/2018/10/03/beam-2.7.0.html >>> >> >> [3] >>> https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/896cbc9fef2e60f19b466d6b1e12ce1aeda49ce5065a0b1156233f01@%3Cdev.beam.apache.org%3E >>> >> >> >>> >> >> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 2:46 PM Austin Bennett < >>> whatwouldausti...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >> >>> >>> >> >>> Hi All, >>> >> >>> >>> >> >>> According to our policies page [1]: "There will be at least one >>> new LTS release in a 12 month period, and LTS releases are considered >>> deprecated after 12 months" >>> >> >>> >>> >> >>> The last LTS was released 2018-10-02 [2]. >>> >> >>> >>> >> >>> Does that mean the next release (2.16) should be the next LTS? >>> It looks like we are in danger of not living up to that promise. >>> >> >>> >>> >> >>> Cheers, >>> >> >>> Austin >>> >> >>> >>> >> >>> >>> >> >>> >>> >> >>> [1] https://beam.apache.org/community/policies/ >>> >> >>> >>> >> >>> [2] https://beam.apache.org/get-started/downloads/ >>> >>
