Hi all,
I’d like to propose a drastic change to how we manage releases, and how often.
It all boils down to the fact that we are not equipped to test, manage and
deploy 3x releases / year. So, attached below is the new, proposed release
schedule, as well as a picture showing an example git branch layout (thanks
Masakazu!).
What does this mean? Well, here are some highlights:
1. We only schedule one main release / year (starting with 7.1.x this year in
May). Each main release branch is 2 years LTS.
2. A release branch is cut off master once a year, meaning, master is always
open for any change. This does not mean that master is unstable, everything we
commit must work, be tested and reviewed etc. (that is not changing!).
3. The community can agree to make a minor release, e.g. v7.2.0 at any given
time during the 7.x 2 year life cycle. Such a release is still branched off the
7.x branch, and *not* master as before. Any such point release is also LTS, for
up to 2 years (same 2 year period as the branch itself).
4. The RM + community agrees on which commits from master should go into a
minor release. This would be for example a new feature, or a new plugin etc.
Critical crashes / security fixes is dealt with as normal with a patch release.
4. Critical fixes (e.g. security fixes) on an LTS branch must be applied to
every LTS minor release on that branch. As an example, this could mean making a
v7.1.1 release as well as a v7.2.1 release.
5. We are somewhat off schedule right now, so the proposal is to make 7.1.x the
7.x LTS branch, and we’ll support this for 2 years. 7.0.x is not LTS and will
not be supported once v7.1.0 is released.
6. We will not schedule a v7.2.0 release for July, nor an v8.0.0 release for
October. Instead, after v7.1.0 is released, the next scheduled release is
v8.0.0, in May 2018.
I’m volunteering to RM this first 7.x release, with Bryan Call assisting on
minor and patch releases.
Cheers,
— leif
The new release schedule and images are on
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TS/Updated+Release+Management
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TS/Updated+Release+Management>
I will move this to the official release page once we agree this is the way we
want to move forward.
