[CRIU] [RFC] Future CRIU releases

[Tycho Andersen]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 07:42:13PM +0300, Pavel Emelyanov wrote:
> On 12/17/2015 07:51 PM, Tycho Andersen wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 03:23:32PM +0300, Pavel Emelyanov wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> We've been playing the time-driven releases model for the past
> >> year and, at some sense, succeeded. However, it seems like the
> >> strict dates that were chosen were not 100% comfortable for all
> >> the parties.
> >>
> >> Also there sometimes appeared the need to have some "quite new"
> >> functionality early (or -- during the one week feature freeze 
> >> period) and waiting till the next release was also not nice.
> >>
> >> So this e-mail is a call for comments -- shall we continue the
> >> once-a-season releases as we do now, should we slightly fix it
> >> (e.g. by formalizing the -stable branches) or should we change
> >> it completely?
> > 
> > I like the fixed date release because it forces us to release stuff.
> > My experience is that everyone wants to wait for "one more bug fix" if
> > we don't have a timed release.
> 
> +1 :)
> 
> > One solution to the "wait for next release" problem is just to release
> > more often, once every 1-2 months maybe instead of once every three
> > months?
> 
> Heh, we've once been thrown away from Debian due to "fast moving
> target, too hard to keep up". How do you chose the release dates
> in LXC/LXD?

Well, nixed from debian stable :). Ubuntu still uses the CRIU debian
packages because we're based on unstable and the maintainer does a
great job uploading things quickly (thanks, if you're reading!).

For LXD we release every two weeks, but the guy who does the packaging
for LXD is very on top of things and has lots of automation, so it's
not particularly difficult for us to release. I like this cadence a
lot, if it's not too much of a burden. This means that we get
fixes/features to users quickly.

For LXC, we do a "when it's ready" type of thing, and we've been
talking about tagging a 2.0 alpha for several months now and it's
still not done. I think we'll tag it soon, but not having a date has
made it so that we can be lax about it, which may or may not be good,
depending on your point of view.

If we do decide to bump the release cadence of CRIU and the debian
packaging becomes a bottleneck, I'm happy to help out there.

> > Of course, it's easy for me to suggest this since I don't have
> > to do any work maintaining releases :)
> > 
> > Another option would be to adjust the dates slightly, say Feb 1, May
> > 1, August 1, Nov 1, which would perhaps align (or not align) with
> > holidays slightly better.
> 
> The beginning of May is almost continuous raw of holidays in Russia :)
> The current months were chosen deliberately not to clash with big
> holidays neither in Russia nor in US...

Ah ha, I only knew about victory day :)

Tycho