On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 02:24:11PM +0200, Ilya Maximets wrote: > While only 2 branches are formally maintained (LTS and latest release), > OVS team usually provides stable releases for other branches too, at > least for branches between LTS and latest. > > While LTS change happens, according to release-process.rst, we're > immediately dropping support for the old LTS and, according to > backporting-patches.rst could stop backporting bug fixes to branches > older than new LTS. While this might be OK for an upstream project > (some upstream projects like QEMU doesn't support anything at all > except the last release) it doesn't sound like a user-friendly policy. > > Below addition to the release process might make the process a bit > smoother in terms that we will continue support of branches a little > bit longer even after changing current LTS, i.e. providing at least a > minimal transition period (1 release frame) for users of old LTS. > We will also not drop support for not so old branches even after the > transition period if committers will follow the "as far as it goes" > backporting policy. > > Still keeping the room for us to not backport disruptive changes or > changes that are hard to maintain or OVN related fixes anywhere but > LTS and the latest released branch. > > After 2 year period (4 releases) committers are still free to backport > fixes they think are needed on older branches, however we will likely > not provide actual releases on these branches, unless it's specially > requested and discussed. > > Effectively, this change means that we will support branch-2.5 until > 2.15 release, i.e. we will provide the last release, if any, on > branch-2.5 somewhere around Feb 2021. (I don't actually expect > much fixes there) And, presumably, at the same time we will provide > last releases for branch 2.11 and below, if needed. > > Additionally, "4 releases" policy aligns with the DPDK LTS support > policy, i.e. we will be able to validate and release last OVS releases > with the last available DPDK LTS, e.g. OVS 2.11 last stable release > will likely be released with the 18.11 EOL release validated. > > Signed-off-by: Ilya Maximets <[email protected]>
This also sounds reasonable to me but I don't feel that I am in a position to sign off on it. Reviewed-by: Simon Horman <[email protected]> Do you, as a follow-up, plan to open a discussion on formalising the LTS selection process? .. _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-dev
