[CRIU] [RFC] Future CRIU releases

[Pavel Emelyanov]

On 12/18/2015 08:50 PM, Tycho Andersen wrote:
> 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.

Do you always release from the master branch? Or have dev/stable ones?

> 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.

Cool :)

>>> 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 :)

Well, technically there are only two holidays out there, but they are
8 days from each other, so they interfere with week-ends in a weird
manner, people take vacations in between and as a result we have up
to 12 effectively non-working days :)

-- Pavel