Hi Willy, On 19:18 Thu 02 Oct , Willy Tarreau wrote: > So my question is : what do you think about the current maintenance > release frequency ? Do you think we should release more often, which > also means that some people might upgrade for no good reason, or get > used to miss versions ? Do you think that instead we should simply > consider that when someone asks for a release here on the list, it's > likely the good time for it ?
As you stated, currently there are two distinct release modes, driven by different needs: - Security vulnerabilities/major bugs - the event-driven release mode: I think everyone will agree that in these cases a release should be as immediate as possible. - Medium/minor bugs - the "never-important-enough-to-warrant-a-release" mode: These tend to pile up in a long queue of commits and wait until either someone asks for a release, or something bad happens. However, even if these fixes are really not that serious, they do fix existing problems. Furthermore, usually someone has complained about these problems and possibly more people have experienced them but not bothered to report them and most of those affected would like to see them fixed in a reasonable amount of time without cherry-picking commits from git themselves. Note that the combination of a long number of unreleased minor fixes with a forced release due to a major bug has higher chances of exposing users to undetected regressions since the last release, precisely at the moment you want all people to upgrade urgently. IMHO, with the 1.5 series being maintenance-only (i.e. no new features) I think we can apply a time-based rule specifying an upper limit, something like "release on the 15th of every month" (or the 1st Monday), as long as there is something to release of course. It's probably tempting to consider schedules like "release before the oldest unreleased git commit is 1 month old", but I think it's essential to stick to a schedule easy to remember (by adding a periodic reminder) and difficult to prolong e.g. by waiting for 2 weeks without bugs. By the way, we are approaching the Debian freeze, due on Nov 5, which means that I would be really happy to see a release by Oct 15. That said, I was about to put on the "that guy who asks for a release" hat :-). Regards, Apollon
