[U-Boot-Custodians] [U-Boot] [ANN] U-Boot v2019.07-rc4 released

[Marek Vasut]

On 6/22/19 4:55 PM, Simon Glass wrote:
> Hi Tom,
> 
> On Tue, 11 Jun 2019 at 02:33, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hey all,
>>
>> It's release day and here is v2019.07-rc4.   At this point, I know we
>> have some regression fixes for i.MX that are coming, and I'm expecting a
>> fix to the build time failure for tinker-rk3288.
>>
>> To repeat myself about DM migration deadlines, first, let me say again,
>> that DM is not required for SPL.  This comes up enough that I want to
>> say it again here.  Next, if there is active progress on converting
>> things, we'll keep from pulling the code out.  This is why for example,
>> we haven't yet pulled out a lot of deprecated SPI code.  Some of it is
>> still in progress on being converted, so I need to update the series I
>> posted after the last -rc to remove still less drivers.
>>
>> In terms of a changelog,
>> git log --merges v2019.07-rc3..v2019.07-rc4
>> continues to improve in quality.  If you're sending me a PR, please
>> include a few lines or words in summary and I'll be sure to put it into
>> the merge commit.
>>
>> As I mentioned with -rc3, with this cycle is coming closer to an end,
>> it's time to decide if we're going to keep this 3 month cycle or go back
>> to 2 months.  After the last release while I did get some feedback, the
>> overall balance is still in the 3 month bucket.
> 
> I vote for 2 months. I find the current release disappears into a
> black hole for a about a month, and patches sit on the list for what
> seems like eternity. I have the option of doing a -next branch but it
> seems that very few do this.
> 
> I'd like to better understand the benefits of the 3-month timeline.

Stability, with the 2 months cycle, there was no time to stabilize the
release and fix bugs, everyone was just cannonfodding patches upstream
all the time. The result was always a release which wasn't quite well
done, had rough edges, unfixed bugs and it wasn't something which you
could deploy.

Now we have 1 month window where we only accept bugfixes and where
things slow down. This removes some stress from the maintainers too.
And that lets us take a step back and think about the bigger project
questions, rather than just dealing with the onslaught of patches.

-- 
Best regards,
Marek Vasut