[U-Boot] Release cycle thoughts

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 2:36 PM, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> So, when I said a few months back that we would try doing a 2 month
> release cycle, I planned things out until the v2016.07 release, since
> that coincided with the old schedule.  As I was looking at the
> ReleaseCycle page today I didn't want to give anyone the wrong
> impression so I've added in v2016.09 and v2016.11 (and updated the MW
> for v2016.07 since 05 was late).
>
> At this point I'm happy with the 2 month cycle.  Does anyone object and
> think we should go back to 3 months?

No objection here, I think it's worked pretty well.

> If no one objects there, I'm pondering going up to monthly for 2017 with
> release generally the first Monday of the month, RCs otherwise on
> Monday.  Shorten the merge window to that first week.  But would make
> planning time easier for everyone.

So presumably a cycle would be a week of merge, two RCs, then GA?

I have a few concerns, I think to make it work we'd need things
release bits a bit more stable because some of the things that
happened this last cycle would just complete screw it up.
* better communication, there were some weeks we didn't have a RC when
it was expected, no comms that I saw as to why, release was delayed a
week and similarly I didn't see any heads up
* guaranteed RCs every time, with concurrent tarballs (eg RC2 didn't
get a tar ball until RC3 was already out)
* what about quieter months like August (ER summer), Nov (US
thanksgiving) and christmas/new year?
* some form of CI platform that does the buildman full tests against
any pull requests, it seems very manual at the moment which doesn't
tend to lend itself to faster cycles.

Peter