Hi,
Based on the discussion in last community meeting and previous discussions,
1. Too frequent releases are difficult to manage.(without dedicated
release manager)
2. Users wants to see features early for testing or POC.
3. Backporting patches to more than two release branches is pain
Enclosed visualizations to understand existing release and support cycle
and proposed alternatives.
- Each grid interval is 6 months
- Green rectangle shows supported release or LTS
- Black dots are minor releases till it is supported(once a month)
- Orange rectangle is non LTS release with minor releases(Support ends
when next version released)
Enclosed following images
1. Existing Release cycle and support plan(6 months release cycle, 3
releases supported all the time)
2. Proposed alternative 1 - One LTS every year and non LTS stable
release once in every 2 months
3. Proposed alternative 2 - One LTS every year and non LTS stable
release once in every 3 months
4. Proposed alternative 3 - One LTS every year and non LTS stable
release once in every 4 months
5. Proposed alternative 4 - One LTS every year and non LTS stable
release once in every 6 months (Similar to existing but only alternate
one will become LTS)
Please do vote for the proposed alternatives about release intervals and
LTS releases. You can also vote for the existing plan.
Do let me know if I missed anything.
regards
Aravinda
On 05/11/2016 12:01 AM, Aravinda wrote:
I couldn't find any solution for the backward incompatible changes. As
you mentioned this model will not work for LTS.
How about adopting this only for non LTS releases? We will not have
backward incompatibility problem since we need not release minor
updates to non LTS releases.
regards
Aravinda
On 05/05/2016 04:46 PM, Aravinda wrote:
regards
Aravinda
On 05/05/2016 03:54 PM, Kaushal M wrote:
On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Aravinda <avish...@redhat.com> wrote:
Hi,
Sharing an idea to manage multiple releases without maintaining
multiple release branches and backports.
This idea is heavily inspired by the Rust release model(you may feel
exactly same except the LTS part). I think Chrome/Firefox also follows
the same model.
http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html
Feature Flag:
--------------
Compile time variable to prevent compiling featurerelated code when
disabled. (For example, ./configure--disable-geo-replication
or ./configure --disable-xml etc)
Plan
-----
- Nightly build with all the features enabled(./build --nightly)
- All new patches will land in Master, if the patch belongs to a
existing feature then it should be written behind that feature
flag.
- If a feature is still work in progress then it will be only
enabled in
nightly build and not enabled in beta or stable builds.
Once the maintainer thinks the feature is ready for testing then
that
feature will be enabled in beta build.
- Every 6 weeks, beta branch will be created by enabling all the
features which maintainers thinks it is stable and previous beta
branch will be promoted as stable.
All the previous beta features will be enabled in stable unless it
is marked as unstable during beta testing.
- LTS builds are same as stable builds but without enabling all the
features. If we decide last stable build will become LTS release,
then the feature list from last stable build will be saved as
`features-release-<NUM>.yaml`, For example:
features-release-3.9.yaml`
Same feature list will be used while building minor releases for
the
LTS. For example, `./build --stable --features
features-release-3.8.yaml`
- Three branches, nightly/master, testing/beta, stable
To summarize,
- One stable release once in 6 weeks
- One Beta release once in 6 weeks
- Nightly builds every day
- LTS release once in 6 months or 1 year, Minor releases once in 6
weeks.
Advantageous:
-------------
1. No more backports required to different release branches.(only
exceptional backports, discussed below)
2. Non feature Bugfix will never get missed in releases.
3. Release process can be automated.
4. Bugzilla process can be simplified.
Challenges:
------------
1. Enforcing Feature flag for every patch
2. Tests also should be behind feature flag
3. New release process
Backports, Bug Fixes and Features:
----------------------------------
- Release bug fix - Patch only to Master, which will be available in
next beta/stable build.
- Urgent bug fix - Patch to Master and Backport to beta and stable
branch, and early release stable and beta build.
- Beta bug fix - Patch to Master and Backport to Beta branch if
urgent.
- Security fix - Patch to Master, Beta and last stable branch and
build
all LTS releases.
- Features - Patch only to Master, which will be available in
stable/beta builds once feature becomes stable.
FAQs:
-----
- Can a feature development take more than one release cycle(6 weeks)?
Yes, the feature will be enabled only in nightly build and not in
beta/stable builds. Once the feature is complete mark it as
stable so that it will be included in next beta build and stable
build.
---
Do you like the idea? Let me know what you guys think.
This reduces the number of versions that we need to maintain, which
I like.
Having official test (beta) releases should help get features out to
testers hand faster,
and get quicker feedback.
One thing that's still not quite clear to is the issue of backwards
compatibility.
I'm still thinking it thorough and don't have a proper answer to
this yet.
Would a new release be backwards compatible with the previous release?
Should we be maintaining compatibility with LTS releases with the
latest release?
Each LTS release will have seperate list of features to be enabled.
If we make any breaking changes(which are not backward compatible)
then it will affect LTS releases as you mentioned. But we should not
break compatibility unless it is major version change like 4.0. I
have to workout how we can handle backward incompatible changes.
With our current strategy, we at least have a long term release branch,
so we get some guarantees of compatibility with releases on the same
branch.
As I understand the proposed approach, we'd be replacing a stable
branch with the beta branch.
So we don't have a long-term release branch (apart from LTS).
Stable branch is common for LTS releases also. Builds will be
different using different list of features.
Below example shows stable release once in 6 weeks, and two LTS
releases in 6 months gap(3.8 and 3.12)
LTS 1 : 3.8 3.8.1 3.8.2 3.8.3 3.8.4 3.8.5...
LTS 2 : 3.12 3.12.1...
Stable: 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13...
A user would be upgrading from one branch to another for every release.
Can we sketch out how compatibility would work in this case?
User will not upgrade from one branch to other branch, If user
interested in stable channel then upgrade once in 6 weeks. (Same as
minor update in current release style)
This approach work well for projects like Chromium and Firefox, single
system apps
which generally don't need to be compatible with the previous
release.
I don't understand how the Rust project uses this (I am yet to read
the linked blog post),
as it requires some sort of backwards compatibility. But it too is a
single system app,
and doesn't have the compatibility problems we face.
Gluster is a distributed system, that can involve multiple different
versions interacting with each other.
This is something we need to think about.
I need to think about compatibility, What new problems about the
compatibility with this approach compared to our existing release plan?
We could work out some sort of a solution for this though.
It might be something very obvious I'm missing right now.
~kaushal
--
regards
Aravinda
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