Thanks Karthik for opening a long overdue discussion on the release cadence and EOL.
As for the EOL, I think we need to weigh between the benefit for the users and the maintenance cost for the community. I'd also love to find out what other (major) open source projects do in terms of the EOL. Here is just an idea to get started. How about "a minor release line is EOLed 2 years after it is released or there are 2 newer minor releases, whichever is sooner. The community reserves the right to extend or shorten the life of a release line if there is a good reason to do so." The idea is to cap the maintenance at 2 years first, but also to consider the actual alternatives. If there were 2 more minor releases, I think they should be good alternatives for users to upgrade. That would also cap the number of simultaneous maintenance lines at 2. I purposefully didn't include major releases (e.g. 3.0.0) in this as it would take a much longer time for users to upgrade from a previous major release. Finally, I think it'd be good to have an escape clause for this so that the community can make a collective decision to extend certain release lines if it is deemed better for the community. This is just a starting point for discussion. Thoughts? Thanks, Sangjin On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 4:45 PM, Karthik Kambatla <ka...@cloudera.com> wrote: > Forking off this discussion from 2.6.5 release thread. Junping and Chris T > have brought up important concerns regarding too many concurrent releases > and the lack of EOL for our releases. > > First up, it would be nice to hear from others on our releases having the > notion of EOL and other predictability is indeed of interest. > > Secondly, I believe EOLs work better in conjunction with a predictable > cadence. Given past discussions on this and current periods between our > minor releases, I would like to propose a minor release on the latest major > line every 6 months and a maintenance release on the latest minor release > every 2 months. > > Eager to hear others thoughts. > > Thanks > Karthik >
