I have no preference. At some point, I think we also have to say that
9.0.x "is what it is". Or do you see us continuing to maintain the
release forever? In the dark, pre-Apache past, I had about a two week
period after the release after which it "is what it is". I distrubuted
patches up until that point. What policy would you recommend?
My thought here is that we collect PRs that are candidates for backporting
with the label and then we can apply them if they look safe and are
important enough (let them bake in master for a bit). I don't think we
have ever really had the concept of a Long Term Support release nor are we
ready for that so I'm thinking we use judgement and try to get back to a
1-2mo release window with maybe room for 1 or 2 bug fix releases inside
that if needed.
That sounds about right to me.
In the future we should think about LTS releases, but we're not ready for
that yet. Too many big things to sort out first. (But we're making
progress.)
Ideally, we should have some rather exhaustive, functional test suite to
qualify releases. But I understand that such extensive testing would be
prohibitively expensive. I have also said that testing is something you
have to buy by the pound. Buy as much as you afford.
Build testing is important but does not address functionality. Things
can be completely broken and still build perfectly.
Currently our functional testing strategy is simply to ask people to
check releases. But no problems have ever been reported from that so I
think it is not working. The related strategy is just to wait awhile
and if no one complains it most be okay. My experience is that bugs
fester in the repository for weeks or months before the are detected and
reported.
Is this something we want to invest in? Understanding that it would be
a long term investment.
Xiao Xiang was suggested some automated testing based on the simulator.
At other times in the past we have talked about developing a test suite
around some reference hardware board. Those discussions did not go anywhere.
Greg
