[U-Boot-Board-Maintainers] [U-Boot] [ANN] U-Boot v2019.07-rc4 released

[Andreas Färber]

Hi,

Am 22.06.19 um 20:15 schrieb Simon Glass:
> On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 16:10, Andreas Färber <afaerber at suse.de> wrote:
>> Am 22.06.19 um 16:55 schrieb Simon Glass:
>>> I'd like to better understand the benefits of the 3-month timeline.
>>
>> It takes time to learn about a release, package and build it, test it on
>> various hardware, investigate and report errors, wait for feedback and
>> fixes, rinse and repeat with the next -rc. Many people don't do this as
>> their main job.
>>
>> If we shorten the release cycle, newer boards will get out faster (which
>> is good) but the overall quality of boards not actively worked on
>> (because they were working good enough before) will decay, which is bad.
>> The only way to counteract that would be to automatically test on real
>> hardware rather than just building, and doing that for all these masses
>> of boards seems unrealistic.
> 
> Here I think you are talking about distributions. But why not just
> take every second release?

You're missing my point: What good is it to do a release when you
yourself consider it of such poor quality that you advise others not to
take it?

That has nothing per-se to do with who uses that release and whether you
build it in OBS or locally.

> I have certain had the experience of getting a board our of the
> cupboard and finding that the latest U-Boot doesn't work, nor the one
> before, nor the three before that.
> 
> Are we actually seeing an improvement in regressions?

I don't understand that question. The proposal, as I understood it, is
to shorten the release cycle by one month, doing six instead of four
releases. How could there be an improvement by leaving it as it is? My
fear is that the change will make it _worse_, i.e. no improvement but
rather risk of more regressions by switching to _two_ months.

In this very same -rc4 thread I reported one such regression, and
luckily a patch was quickly prepared to address it. It's not yet merged
despite tested - review also takes time.

> I feel that
> testing is the only way to get that.

Agreed. And my point was that testing takes time. Increasing the release
frequency shortens the time for testing of each release.

> Perhaps we should select a small subset of boards which do get tested,
> and actually have custodians build/test on those for every rc?

Many custodians are volunteers. You can't force them to test boards at a
pace you dictate to them. Also, more frequent releases also increase the
chances of a custodian/maintainer being on vacation during a release.

And a working, say, BeagleBone doesn't make the user of a random other
board any happier. ;-)

Regards,
Andreas

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