Hi everyone, I want to propose shipping Geode on a regular cadence. My concrete proposal is to ship Geode every 3 months on the first weekday. To make sure we hit that date we would cut the release 1 months prior to that day.
*Why?* Knowing on what day the release will get cut and on what day we ship allows community members to plan their contributions. If I want my feature to be in the next release I know by when I need to have it merged to develop and can plan accordingly. As a user who is waiting for a particular feature or fix that's already on develop, I know when to expect the release that includes this work and again, can plan accordingly. This makes working and using Apache Geode more predictable which makes all our lives less stressful. To make this work, it's important to be strict about cutting the release branch on the set date and only allow critical fixes after the release has been cut. Once we start compromising on this, we go down a slippery slope that ultimately leads to not getting the predictability benefits described here. Some other successful Apache projects share similar approaches: - Kafka <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Future+release+plan> releases every 4 months and cuts the release 1 month prior - PredictionIO <https://predictionio.apache.org/resources/release/> releases every 2 months - Spark <https://spark.apache.org/versioning-policy.html> does not seem to have a hard date, but aims to ship every 6 months, so there is at least a goal date *What?* As stated above, I suggest to release every three months. Given we just shipped the next release would go out on January 2nd. That timing in unfortunate, due to the holidays. Therefore I propose to aim for a December 3rd (1st Monday in December) release. In order to meet that date, we should cut the release branch on November 1st. That also means that we should start finding a volunteer to manager the release on October 25th. I know this seems really close, given we just shipped, but keep in mind that this is to avoid the holidays and that we already have close to a month worth of work on develop. *Proposed near future schedule:* October 25th: Find release manager November 1st: Cut 1.8 release branch December 1st: Ship 1.8 January 28th: Find release manager February 1st: Cut 1.9 release branch March 1st: Ship 1.9 and so on... Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feedback on this!
