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

[Andreas Färber]

Hi Simon,

Am 22.06.19 um 21:14 schrieb Simon Glass:
> On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 20:08, Andreas Färber <afaerber at suse.de> wrote:
>> 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?
> 
> Who said that?

You, quoted above. In response to my concerns about decreasing quality
you suggested to take only every second release. That doesn't improve
the quality of either. It implies that one may have such bad quality
that people should skip it and yet does nothing to improve the next.

> Your point, I thought, was that people didn't have time to test it?

Not quite, I was talking about the full build-test-report-fix cycle
taking its time. Bugs in one -rc don't necessarily get detected and
fixed in time for the next -rc.

And I fail to see how your suggestion of skipping releases gives them
more time to test before the U-Boot release. That would rather be an
argument for slowing down the U-Boot release cycle beyond 3 months
(which I'm not asking).

Regards,
Andreas

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