Hi All, This is about short term stable maintenance, ~3 months based on n.02/05/08 DPDK. It is **not** referring/impacting DPDK LTS, maintained for ~2 years based on n.11 DPDK.
The effort and usefulness of short term stable maintenance was raised previously and in the last DPDK Release meeting [1], so sending mail to kick off discussion here... Currently DPDK 19.02 stable branch has no maintainer and it has been difficult to get the companies to validate DPDK 18.08.1 RC. There seems to be a lack of appetite in the community for short term stables, or at least for all of them, and hence giving resources for helping them. It could be that users are either moving from latest bleeding edge master release to the next, or settling on DPDK LTS for an extended period of time - I'm just speculating, but IMHO that would not be a bad thing. So what to do with short term stables? Some choices could be: - continue with short term stables for n.02/05/08 - ad-hoc support for short term stables where community have an interest in a particular one - have a maintainer to backport fixes on a public branch, but have no releases, or have unvalidated/best effort validated releases - no short term stable branches/releases Probably there's other ideas too. Obviously most of the above would need resources from the community to proceed. One advantage of not having short term stables is that there might be more resources available for maintenance/validation of master and LTS DPDK releases. Thoughts? thanks, Kevin. [1] https://mails.dpdk.org/archives/dev/2019-March/126006.html
